X

Sort by

Quote length

Sentiment

Change font

Change background

William Faulkner Inspirational Quotes (340)

Page 4 of 15
Filter & Style
Image
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
William Faulkner
Image
Wonder. Go on and wonder.
William Faulkner
Image
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
William Faulkner
Image
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner
Image
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.
William Faulkner
Image
Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Image
The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience
William Faulkner
Image
Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Image
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
William Faulkner
Image
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
William Faulkner
Image
The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
William Faulkner
Image
When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William Faulkner
Image
The writer's only responsibility is to his art...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.
William Faulkner
Image
Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
William Faulkner
Image
Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico
William Faulkner
Image
No man can write who is not first a humanitarian
William Faulkner
Image
It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours he can't drink for eight hours he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
William Faulkner
Image
Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
William Faulkner
Image
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
William Faulkner
Image
If there is a God what the hell is He for?
William Faulkner
Image
It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
William Faulkner
Image
Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.
William Faulkner
Image
To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
William Faulkner
Image
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
William Faulkner
Previous
Next