William Faulkner Quotes

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

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.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... 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.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.