Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.”

— William Faulkner

352. “Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Shirts. I thought all the time they were khaki, army issue khaki, until I saw they were of heavy Chinese silk or finest flannel because they made his face so brown his eyes so blue. Dalton Ames. It just missed gentility. Theatrical fixture. Just papier-mache, then touch. Oh. Asbestos. Not quite bronze.”

— William Faulkner

353. “I am too old for this. I was born too old for it, and so I am sick to death for quiet.”

— William Faulkner

354. “Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable – -And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.”

— William Faulkner

355. “From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.”

— William Faulkner

356. “The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.”

— William Faulkner

357. “Like any good optimist, I don’t expect the worst to happen. Only, like any optimist worth his salt, I like to go and look as soon as possible afterward jest in case it did.”

— William Faulkner

358. “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.”

— William Faulkner

359. “You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.”

— William Faulkner

360. “But who knows why a man, though suffering, clings, above all the other well members, to the arm or leg which he knows must come off?”

— William Faulkner

361. “Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that–but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep.”

— William Faulkner

362. “Innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn’t have to fear and be afraid.”

— William Faulkner

363. “The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.”

— William Faulkner

364. “A novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet.”

— William Faulkner

365. “I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.”

— William Faulkner

366. “Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock.”

— William Faulkner

367. “They travelled crosstown now; the cab could rush fast down each block of the continuous alley, pausing only at the intersections where, to the right, canyonniched, the rumor of Grandlieu Street swelled and then faded in repetitive and indistinguishable turmoil, flicking on and past as though the cab ran along the rimless periphery of a ghostly wheel spoked with light and sound.”

— William Faulkner

368. “Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.”

— William Faulkner

369. “She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling.”

— William Faulkner

370. “I was a little crazy. You know how it is, how you want to rush into something you know is going to happen, no matter what it is. I guess lovers and suicides both know that feeling.”

— William Faulkner

371. “When folks wants a fellow, it’s best to wait till they sends for him, I’ve found.”

— William Faulkner

372. “I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man’s abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.”

— William Faulkner

373. “And that wasn’t the first time it ever occurred to me that this world ain’t run like it ought to be run a heap of more times than what it is.”

— William Faulkner

374. “He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary.”

— William Faulkner

375. “The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.”

— William Faulkner

376. “Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t.”

— William Faulkner

377. “Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.”

— William Faulkner

378. “When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.”

— William Faulkner

379. “The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long.”

— William Faulkner

380. “I write when I am inspired and I make sure I am inspired every day.”

— William Faulkner

381. “I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain’s surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized.”

— William Faulkner

382. “Let the past abolish the past when – and if – it can substitute something better.”

— William Faulkner

383. “It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time, not for material gain but for principle – honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage – the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing, put to the ultimate test and proving nothing save the finality of death and the vanity of all endeavor.”

— William Faulkner

384. “She accepted that – not reconciled: accepted – as though there is a breathing-point in outrage when you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, ’thank God, this is all; at least I now know all of it –.”

— William Faulkner

385. “Yes, we laughed, because I have learned this at least during these four years, that it really requires an empty stomach to laugh with, that only when you are hungry or frightened do you extract some ultimate essence out of laughing just as the empty stomach extracts the ultimate essence out of alcohol.”

— William Faulkner

386. “Yes, urge I do: warped chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet with some globed concentrate more globed and concentrate and heady-perfect because the neglected root was planted warped and lay not dead but merely slept forgot?”

— William Faulkner

387. “I don’t like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65.”

— William Faulkner

388. “Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;.”

— William Faulkner

389. “Meet Mrs. Bundren, he says.”

— William Faulkner

390. “He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.”

— William Faulkner

391. “I don’t think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don’t know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it – you can’t teach it.”

— William Faulkner

392. “The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.”

— William Faulkner

393. “She wasn’t born for this kind of life. You have to be born for this like you have to be born a butcher or a barber, I guess. Wouldn’t anybody be either of them just for money or fun.”

— William Faulkner

394. “When ideas come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.”

— William Faulkner

395. “The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t.”

— William Faulkner

396. “Any live man is better than any dead man.”

— William Faulkner

397. “He’s crossed all the oceans all around the world.”

— William Faulkner

398. “Nowadays he drove the car into town to fetch his grandfather from habit alone, and though he still considered forty five miles an hour merely cruising speed, he no longer took cold and fiendish pleasure in turning curves on two wheels or in detaching mules from wagons by striking the whiffle-trees with his bumper in passing.”

— William Faulkner

399. “What sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury he can efface by destroying the victim and the witness but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter.”

— William Faulkner

400. “If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dream hit, hit can’t be a lie case ain’t nobody there to tole hit to you.”

— William Faulkner