William Faulkner Quotations

William Faulkner

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking.

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.

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.

The artist is a cut above the critic, for the artist is writing something which will move the critic. The critic is writing something which will move everybody but the artist.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.