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.
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
Wonder. Go on and wonder.
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest
My mother is a fish.
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
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.
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune
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.
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.
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….
![Memory believes before knowing remembers.
[Light in August]](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/william-faulkner-57326.jpg)
Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
There is no was.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.
She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
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.
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
You can't. You just have to.
The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.
And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
Love doesn't die; the men and women do.
Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.
He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
Caddy smelled like trees.
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
History is not was, it is.
I am not one of those women who can stand things.
I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.
She was the captain of her soul
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
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.
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
My, my. A body does get around.
If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
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
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie
