Quotes from William Faulkner

If there is a God what the hell is He for?

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

...and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all; and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, 'Thank God for nothing.'

the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

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

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.

Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.

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

If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

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

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.