A gentleman can live through anything.
William Faulkner
- Life
- 1897-1962
- Occupations
- screenwriter, poet, novelist
- Notable works
- The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August
Facts: Wikidata (CC0), as of 2026-07-09
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.
William Faulkner
Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
William Faulkner
I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
William Faulkner
Poor man. Poor mankind.
William Faulkner
She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it’s the risk, the gamble. In any event it’s a thing I need.
William Faulkner
Well, between Scotch and nothin’, I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
Why that’s a hundred miles away. That’s a long way to go just to eat.
William Faulkner
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
William Faulkner