Quotes from William Faulkner

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...

I don't want money badly enough to work for it.

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

My mother is a fish.

It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

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

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.

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.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

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

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

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

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

There is no was.