100 Profound William Faulkner Quotes You Need To Know
One of the most celebrated American authors, William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize winning novelist. Faulkner, who's known for his exemplary contribution to Southern literature, wrote challenging prose and write-ups. Despite tough competition by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, this Mississippi born writer created a new identity for himself through the apocryphal 'Yoknapatawpha County'. Based on the legend of Lafayette County, Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha for fifty of his novels except 'A Fable', 'Soldier's Pay', 'The Wild Palms' and 'Pylon'. Faulkner highlighted major controversial matters related to class, race, sex and social ideologies in his best works-- 'The Sound and the Fury', 'Sanctuary', 'As I Lay Dying', 'Light in August', 'The Reivers' and 'A Rose for Emily'. A thorough humanitarian as he was, he donated a part of his Nobel money to Oxford bank for funding education of African-American teachers and creating the Faulkner Award for Fiction writing. This two-times Pulitzer and U.S. National Prize winner received a special mention in acceptance speech delivered by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The US postal services issued an exclusive 22-cent postal stamp in his honor, for he served as a postmaster at Mississippi University.
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.
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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.
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
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.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
Wonder. Go on and wonder.
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
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.
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest
My mother is a fish.
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
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.
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune
