Quotes from William Faulkner

I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.

any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man

Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.

Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art...If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

History is not was, it is.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

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

And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business.

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

I decline to accept the end of man.

You know that if I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of kindness and compassion.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.