William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, essays, and a play. Hope, our collection of William Faulkner Quotes will inspire a writer within you.
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
– William Faulkner
William Faulkner Quotes
1. “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.” – William Faulkner
2. “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” – William Faulkner
3. “It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you – religion, pride, anything – it’s when you realise that you don’t need any aid.” – William Faulkner
4. “War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.” – William Faulkner
5. “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” – William Faulkner
6. “The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – William Faulkner
7. “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.” – William Faulkner
8. “Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.” – William Faulkner
9. “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” – William Faulkner
10. “Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.” – William Faulkner
11. “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” – William Faulkner
12. “I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.” – William Faulkner
13. “A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.” – William Faulkner
14. “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.” – William Faulkner
15. “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.” – William Faulkner
16. “Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.” – William Faulkner
17. “No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.” – William Faulkner
18. “And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.” – William Faulkner
19. “People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.” – William Faulkner
20. “A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.” – William Faulkner
21. “Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” – William Faulkner
22. “I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail…because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” – William Faulkner
23. “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.” – William Faulkner
24. “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
25. “A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don’t square.” – William Faulkner
26. “Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.” – William Faulkner
27. “No battle is ever won … victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” – William Faulkner
28. “There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.” – William Faulkner
29. “The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.” – William Faulkner
30. “Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.” – William Faulkner
31. “Pouring out liquor is like burning books.” – William Faulkner
32. “Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.” – William Faulkner
33. “Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.” – William Faulkner
34. “Civilization begins with distillation.” – William Faulkner
35. “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.” – William Faulkner
36. “You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.” – William Faulkner
37. “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
38. “A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.” – William Faulkner
39. “It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.” – William Faulkner
40. “Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.” – William Faulkner
