Quotations from
Wm. Faulkner
[1897-1962]

William Faulkner wrote a series of novels and stories set in a mythical Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction. He wrote for the Hollywood studios, moving back and forth to his beloved Rowan Oak estate in Oxford, Mississippi.

Links are provided below for further investigation.
The references to WMail issues indicate quotes that appeared in the free monthly 'WMail' ezine
connected with the revolutionary "Working Minds Philosophy of Empowerment" created by G.E. Nordell.

After WMail Issue #72 in October 2007, essays & quotations & news are being posted to the Dateline Chamesa blog

William Faulkner entry at Wikipedia

William Faulkner Page
at Spirit of America Bookstore

“There's only one thing to write about: the human heart in conflict with itself.”  {Issue #46}
•      •
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good.”  {Issue #69}
•      •
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”  {Issue #71}
•      •
“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.”  {blog 4/2008}
•      •
“The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.”  {blog 4/2008}
•      •
“A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them
the right to dream.”  {blog 4/2008}
•      •
“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid
failure to do the impossible.”  {blog 4/2008}
•      •
“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better
than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”  {blog 5/2009}
•      •
“If a story is in you, it has got to come out.”  {blog 12/2009}
•      •
“People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do;
I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude,
endurance. Only vegetables are always happy.”  {blog 5/2010}
•      •
“An artist is a creature driven by demons – he usually doesn't know why they chose him
and he's usually too busy to wonder why.”  {blog 12/2010}
•      •
“Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be
better than yourself.”  {blog 6/2011}
•      •
“No man is ever free, and he couldn't stand it if he were.”  {blog 7/2011}
•      •
“Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.”  {blog 2/2012}
•      •
“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”  {blog 3/2012}
•      •
“Civilization begins with distillation.”  {blog 8/2012}
•      •
“The tools [that] I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.”  {blog 11/2014}
•      •
“Hollywood is the place . . . where you can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.”  {blog 7/2021}
•      •
“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.”  {blog 8/2023}

Faulkner Quotations Not Yet Used on the Blog

"I believe that man will not only endure: He will prevail."
Wm. Faulkner's famous line from his Nobel speech, 1950

"A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once."

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

"Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder."

"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."

"It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence
is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died."

"Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he
finds that he can bear anything."

"My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco,
food, and a little whisky."

"Perhaps they were right in putting love into books . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else."

"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 doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews,
the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."

"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."

"This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them."

"To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color
is like living in Alaska and being against snow."

"To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi."

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

"Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing
to good moonshine [that] I can find."

"You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches
the Old Testament: with faith."

top of this page

Abraham Lincoln Quotations Page
Albert Einstein Quotations Page
Ayn Rand Quotations Page
Benjamin Franklin Quotations Page
Bertrand Russell Quotations Page
Edward Abbey Quotations Page
Edward R. Murrow Quotations Page
Eric Hoffer Quotations Page
Ernest Hemingway Quotations Page
Friedrich Nietzsche Quotations Page
G.E. Nordell Quotations Page
George Bernard Shaw Quotations Page
H.L. Mencken Quotations Page
Henry David Thoreau Quotations Page
John Steinbeck Quotations Page
Mahatma Gandhi Quotations Page
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotations Page
Mark Twain Quotations Page
Oscar Wilde Quotations Page
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotations Page
Theodore Roosevelt Quotations Page
Thomas Jefferson Quotations Page
Wm. Faulkner Quotations Page  «« you are here
Winston Churchill Quotations Page

Magic Lantern's Great Movie Quotes Page

Books of Quotations Page at Working Minds

William Faulkner Page at Spirit of America Bookstore

back to WMail Quotations Pages   ••   back to Working Minds Philosophy homepage