Quotes from William Faulkner

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

Too much happens ... Man performs, engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

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

It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

I decline to accept the end of men... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

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

The past is never dead-it is not even past.

The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.