Quotes from William Faulkner

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

A gentleman can live through anything.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

jefferson, yoknapatawpha co., Mississippi. Area, 2400 Square Miles. Population, Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. william faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor.

I've seed de first en de last…. I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

Too much happens…. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything…. That's what's so terrible.

Why do you hate the South?I dont hate it…. I dont hate it…. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not competed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it and it works."

Poor man. Poor mankind.

They [the Negroes] will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion—not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

Gettysburg.… You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.