Quotes from William Faulkner

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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.

Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

I decline to accept the end of man.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one…. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Be scared. You cant help that. But dont be afraid. Aint nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

Business is always interfering with pleasure, but it makes other pleasures possible.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours --all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

The world is still, for she is old And many´s the bead of life she´s told. Her gossip there, the watching moon Views hill and stream and wave and dune

We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job.

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.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.