Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.
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
History
Abolished
Leaving
Ambition
Private
Individual
More quotes by William Faulkner
The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
William Faulkner
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
William Faulkner
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
William Faulkner
Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
William Faulkner
The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
William Faulkner
I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
William Faulkner
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
William Faulkner
I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.
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
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
William Faulkner
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
William Faulkner
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
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
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
Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
William Faulkner
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The reason I don't like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.
William Faulkner
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
William Faulkner
