Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Faulkner
Age: 64 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 25
Died: 1962
Died: July 6
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New Albany
Mississippi
William Cuthbert Faulkner
William Falkner
William Cuthbert Falkner
Learning
Shoot
Inspirational
Improvement
Dream
Bother
Better
Excellence
Trying
Personality
Always
Motivational
Life
Courage
Contemporaries
Higher
Predecessors
More quotes by William Faulkner
It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
William Faulkner
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.
William Faulkner
True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
William Faulkner
People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.
William Faulkner
Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
William Faulkner
...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
William Faulkner
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
By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
William Faulkner
I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie
William Faulkner
The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.
William Faulkner
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
William Faulkner
My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
William Faulkner
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
William Faulkner
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
William Faulkner
Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
William Faulkner
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
William Faulkner
You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
William Faulkner
When ideas come, I write them when they don't come, I don't.
William Faulkner
A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
William Faulkner
It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.
William Faulkner