891 Quotes by William Faulkner

Show me the man what aint going to die, bless Jesus.

A novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet.

So you believe in the rightness of man?" I said."I will beat the heads off yez all for a shilling," Comyn said."I believe in the pitiableness of man," the subadar said. "That is better.

Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.

...women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...

It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.