891 Quotes by William Faulkner

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

They killed us, but they ain’t whooped us yet.

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.

From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.

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

I prefer to think that no writer has got time to be too concerned with style, that he is simply telling this dramatic instance in the most effective way he knows, that the book, the story, creates its own style.

The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene...

When we saw her again her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows – sort of tragic and serene.