891 Quotes by William Faulkner

I listen to the voices.

She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.

A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.

Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

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

We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.