Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “You’re looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it’s hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.”

— William Faulkner

252. “It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible.”

— William Faulkner

253. “I said I have committed incest father I said.”

— William Faulkner

254. “It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.”

— William Faulkner

255. “I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.”

— William Faulkner

256. “He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn’t smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.”

— William Faulkner

257. “He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”

— William Faulkner

258. “So this is love. I see. I was wrong about it too’, thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.”

— William Faulkner

259. “There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.”

— William Faulkner

260. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

— William Faulkner

261. “There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his.”

— William Faulkner

262. “Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.”

— William Faulkner

263. “It was like the last act on a set stage. It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn’t know what except that he would not grieve. He would be humble and proud that he had been found worthy to be a part of it too or even just to see it too.”

— William Faulkner

264. “He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.”

— William Faulkner

265. “They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”

— William Faulkner

266. “Well, between Scotch and nothin’, I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.”

— William Faulkner

267. “Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.”

— William Faulkner

268. “Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.”

— William Faulkner

269. “I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement.”

— William Faulkner

270. “Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”

— William Faulkner

271. “By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.”

— William Faulkner

272. “This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all.”

— William Faulkner

273. “Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won’t be memory because it won’t know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. -Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

— William Faulkner

274. “If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn’t date.”

— William Faulkner

275. “This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.”

— William Faulkner

276. “I don’t want money badly enough to work for it.”

— William Faulkner

277. “I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.”

— William Faulkner

278. “And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rabbit.”

— William Faulkner

279. “A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don’t square.”

— William Faulkner

280. “I’m inclined to think that a military background wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

— William Faulkner

281. “Our windows were dark. The entrance was empty. I walked close to the left wall when I entered, but it was empty: just the stairs curving up into shadows echoes of feet in the sad generations like light dust upon the shadows, my feet waking them like dust, lightly to settle again. I.”

— William Faulkner

282. “Once I waked with a black void rushing under me.”

— William Faulkner

283. “When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.”

— William Faulkner

284. “Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up.”

— William Faulkner

285. “Eating the business of eating inside of you space too space and time confused Stomach saying noon brain saying eat oclock.”

— William Faulkner

286. “He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.”

— William Faulkner

287. “So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be the best thing.”

— William Faulkner

288. “A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”

— William Faulkner

289. “I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.”

— William Faulkner

290. “Hemingway shot himself. I don’t like a man that takes the short way home.”

— William Faulkner

291. “In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.”

— William Faulkner

292. “Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.”

— William Faulkner

293. “Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.”

— William Faulkner

294. “Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.”

— William Faulkner

295. “He puts his shoes on, stomping into them, like he does everything, like he is hoping all the time he really cant do it and can quit trying to.”

— William Faulkner

296. “It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show.”

— William Faulkner

297. “Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.”

— William Faulkner

298. “A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.”

— William Faulkner

299. “We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won’t.”

— William Faulkner

300. “He says it harshly, savagely, but he does not say the word. Like a little boy in the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast into silence by his own noise.”

— William Faulkner