Faulkner Quotes

“Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”
― William Faulkner

“Civilization begins with distillation”
― William Faulkner

“My father is a fish.”
― Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse

“Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?"
"Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men.”
― John Grisham, Camino Island

“I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is in my heart: I know it is.”
― William Faulkner

“That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.”
― Kelli Jae Baeli, Don't Fall in Love With Your Words: Fall in Love With Your Craft

“the listening part is afraid that there may not be time to say it". Dewey Dell - As I Lay Dying.”
― William Faulkner

“Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Faulkner once said that all novels are shipwrecks. Derelicts. and he was right. There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone without exception, has weaknesses and is trapped in his age and environment, and may even be ridiculous. But if he is an honourable man and if it is an honourable book, no one has the right to ridicule it or heap contempt upon it. Genuine lovers of literature will instead feel sorry that the author was not up to some things, and will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism. Such treasure is there, far more often than the snobs know, or are prepared to admit.”
― Josef Škvorecký, Engineer of Human Souls

“Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.”
― William Faulkner

“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

“She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner

“I think the best way I can put it,” Tom summarized, “was what I was once told that a Confederate prisoner said to his Union captor. The Yank said: ‘Why do you fight us so hard, Reb?’, and his prisoner replied: ‘Because you are here, Yank’.”
― C.G. Faulkner, Unreconstructed

“Not every artist has to make a living making art. Millions of people who play guitar would do well to keep their day jobs. Plenty of people make incredible art "on the side". William Faulkner wasn't any less of an artist for writing As I lay Dying on the back of a wheelbarrow during breaks in his job shoveling coal for the electric company.”
― Michael Gungor, The Crowd, The Critic And The Muse: A Book For Creators

“When folks wants a fellow, it's best to wait till they sends for him, I've found.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“It used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury / As I Lay Dying

“One thing about Faulkner I like, apart from the simplicity, on the whole, of his life, was that he wrote on the bedroom walls. That seems to me the true mark of a writer.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“Collecting statistics at camp Zachary Taylor after the armistice [WW1 1918], I found that out of two hundred and fifty men from Kentucky and Tennessee, ninety were completely illiterate, several were actual imbeciles, two had syphilitic rheumatism; and any number had married at childhood ages, from twelve - the youngest - to seventeen. They had married girls from nine - the youngest - to fourteen. So I am ready to believe that the Faulkner and Caldwell depictions of ingrown sections of the country are based upon actual conditions....”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“William Faulkner said more asinine things than any other major American writer.”
― Mailer

“I guess maybe a talking man hasn't got the time to ever learn much about anything except words.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“We can invest trifles with a tragic profundity, which is the world.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“Sometimes I think aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Чтобы родить тебя, нужны двое, а чтобы умереть — один. Вот как кончится мир.”
― Уильям Фолкнер, As I Lay Dying

“It is only by imposing a naïve and unexamined aesthetic of their own, [Tzvetan] Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of these novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“Citeşte, citeşte, citeşte. Citeşte totul – gunoi, clasicii, răii şi bunii, şi vezi cum scriu. La fel ca un tâmplar care lucrează ca ucenic şi îşi studiază maestrul. Citeşte! Vei absorbi asta. Apoi scrie. Dacă ai scris ceva bun, vei afla. Dacă nu, aruncă ce-ai scris pe fereastră.”
― William Faulkner

“I read a quote from Absalom, Absalom! It's a reference to some of the plants that have already lost their blooms: "...and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers, but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard, tight sticky buds... on Judas trees and beech and maple...you find that you have been wanting that pretty hard for some time..."
In his story Faulkner may have been suggesting a lustful want for the maiden Judith Sutpen, but I take it another direction. As hard as Mississippi can be, I realize now I have indeed been wanting that pretty hard for some time.
If only I had known to avoid the wisteria. Instead, I said no when I should have said yes; said yes when I should have said no---and that mistake has nearly choked the life from me.”
― Julie Cantrell, Perennials

“Though Faulkner has written at times about depraved people doing depraved things, he never denies his characters their basic humanity. He does not condescend to them and he always allows them whatever modicum or dignity they are entitled to; his humor and compassion are always in evidence.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“And we’d sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis’s voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung over his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.”
― William Faulkner