William Faulkner was born in 1897 and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. He published his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, in 1926. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, and essays during his career. Some of his most famous works include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom! Absalom! (1936), and Go Down Moses (1942). Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel. He died in 1962.
Discover the strongest Writers, Truth, Women, Time, Artists, Life quotes from William Faulkner, and much more.
Notable Works: The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light In August, Absalom, Absalom!, “A Rose For Emily”, “The Bear”
Notable Awards: Nobel Prize In Literature
WILLIAM FAULKNER QUOTES ON LIFE
No man is a failure who is enjoying life. — William Faulkner
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means. — William Faulkner
Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down. — William Faulkner
How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. — 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
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
We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears! — William Faulkner
So vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble–dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream. — William Faulkner
No one individual can tell the truth. — William Faulkner
Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth. — William Faulkner
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view. — William Faulkner
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
What is William Faulkner known for?
American novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He is remembered for his pioneering use of the stream-of-consciousness technique as well as the range and depth of his characterization. Source
A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don’t square. — William Faulkner
WILLIAM FAULKNER QUOTES ON WOMEN
I am not one of those women who can stand things. — William Faulkner
Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don’t. They don’t care what he said. They listens because of what he is. — William Faulkner
Women … to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint. — William Faulkner
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks. — William Faulkner
You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to. — William Faulkner
Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing. — William Faulkner
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves. — William Faulkner
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. — William Faulkner
Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five–foot–thick maggot–cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins. — William Faulkner
WILLIAM FAULKNER QUOTES ABOUT TIME
If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time — William Faulkner
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely. — William Faulkner
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you. — 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
We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won’t. — William Faulkner
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. — William Faulkner
Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it. — William Faulkner
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing. — William Faulkner
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune — William Faulkner
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it. — William Faulkner
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time. — William Faulkner
Redundant Thematics
In William Faulkner Statements
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Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does Time come to life. — William Faulkner
Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. — William Faulkner
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice. — William Faulkner
I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. — William Faulkner
Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time. — William Faulkner
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets. — William Faulkner
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. — William Faulkner
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich. — William Faulkner
The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene. — William Faulkner
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was–only is. — William Faulkner
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863… — William Faulkner
WILLIAM FAULKNER QUOTES ON WRITERS
In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger. — William Faulkner
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. — William Faulkner
Where is William Faulkner from?
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897.
He grew up in nearby Oxford, Mississippi, where his father owned a livery stable.
A reluctant student, Faulkner left high school without graduating but devoted himself to “undirected reading,” first in isolation and later under the guidance of a family friend
The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. — William Faulkner
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. — William Faulkner
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. — William Faulkner
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art…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. — William Faulkner
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
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
A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can. — William Faulkner
WILLIAM FAULKNER QUOTES ON ARTISTS
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it’s an excuse for a form of behavior. — William Faulkner
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. — William Faulkner
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. — 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
An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. — William Faulkner
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it. — 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
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
What is William Faulkner’s style of writing like?
William Faulkner is associated with the Modernist and Southern gothic literary movements.
The majority of his novels are set in the postbellum American South.
His most technically sophisticated works—including The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying —make use of Modernist writing techniques such as unreliable narrators and stream-of-consciousness narration
The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He’s supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn’t part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation. — William Faulkner
