891 Quotes by 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.

Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.

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. Since man is mortal, the only immotality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artists way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.

There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

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.