Quotes from William Faulkner

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…. That's what's so terrible.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

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

He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

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

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 dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... 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.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.