25 William Faulkner Quotes on Writing, the South, and the Human Heart
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American novelist and short-story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 for his creation of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi -- a densely populated, multigenerational world that stands as one of the most ambitious achievements in modern fiction. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, he dropped out of the University of Mississippi, briefly served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War I (the war ended before he saw combat), and worked odd jobs while writing. His experimental novels 'The Sound and the Fury,' 'As I Lay Dying,' 'Light in August,' and 'Absalom, Absalom!' used stream-of-consciousness narration, multiple perspectives, and fractured chronology to explore race, class, memory, and the burden of Southern history.
William Faulkner wrote sentences that bend time, memory, and morality into a single breath. From the fictional landscape of Yoknapatawpha County, he excavated truths about guilt, endurance, and the stubborn persistence of the past that resonate far beyond the American South. These 25 quotes from his novels, Nobel Prize address, and interviews reveal a writer who believed, above all, in the capacity of the human heart to prevail.
Who Was William Faulkner?
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Born | September 25, 1897 |
| Died | July 6, 1962 (age 64) |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Novelist, Short Story Writer, Screenwriter |
| Known For | The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom Absalom!, Nobel Prize 1949 |
Key Achievements and Episodes
The Sound and the Fury: A Novel Told by an Idiot
Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury tells the decline of the Compson family through four perspectives, the first of which belongs to Benjy, a man with severe intellectual disability. Faulkner’s experimental technique -- stream of consciousness, temporal fragmentation, multiple unreliable narrators -- was so radical that the novel was initially dismissed by many readers. It sold poorly for decades. Today it is considered one of the greatest American novels, and its opening section, narrating events from the perspective of a mind that cannot comprehend them, is regarded as one of the most daring achievements in modern fiction.
Writing Hollywood Screenplays to Pay the Bills
Despite being one of America’s greatest novelists, Faulkner could not support his family on his fiction alone. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he worked intermittently as a screenwriter in Hollywood, contributing to films including To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. He famously hated the work. When asked by a producer if he could write at home, Faulkner agreed -- and flew back to Mississippi. His dual life as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and a struggling Hollywood hack illustrates the persistent gap between literary prestige and financial reward in American culture.
Who Was William Faulkner?
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in the nearby town of Oxford, which would become the model for his fictional Jefferson. He grew up steeped in the oral storytelling traditions of the South, listening to tales of the Civil War, family decline, and racial injustice from relatives and neighbors. His great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, was a Civil War veteran, railroad builder, and novelist whose outsized legend cast a long shadow over the family. That inherited burden of history -- glory entangled with guilt -- became the defining obsession of Faulkner's art.
Faulkner was an indifferent student who dropped out of the University of Mississippi after three semesters, yet he read voraciously on his own, absorbing Shakespeare, Keats, Conrad, and the French Symbolists. After a brief stint in the Royal Air Force Canada during World War I -- he never saw combat -- he returned to Oxford and began writing poetry before turning to fiction. His early novels, Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), attracted little attention. The breakthrough came when he invented Yoknapatawpha County, a densely imagined Mississippi landscape populated by interconnected families whose stories he would chronicle across nineteen novels and dozens of short stories.
Between 1929 and 1936, Faulkner produced an astonishing run of masterpieces that redefined the possibilities of the American novel. The Sound and the Fury (1929) shattered conventional narrative by filtering the Compson family's dissolution through four radically different perspectives, including the mind of Benjy, a man with an intellectual disability for whom time has no sequence. As I Lay Dying (1930), reportedly written in six weeks while working night shifts at a power plant, gave fifteen narrators a voice in the grotesque, darkly comic odyssey of the Bundren family. Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) plunged deeper into the entangled legacies of race, class, and obsession in the post-Civil War South, employing labyrinthine sentences that mirrored the characters' tortured attempts to understand their own histories.
Despite critical admiration, Faulkner's complex prose did not produce bestsellers, and for much of the 1930s and 1940s he supplemented his income as a screenwriter in Hollywood, contributing to films such as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. By 1945 nearly all of his books were out of print. It was Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner (1946) that revived public interest and helped the Swedish Academy recognize him with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, awarded in 1950. His acceptance speech in Stockholm -- a brief, luminous address declaring that humanity would not merely endure but prevail -- became one of the most celebrated pieces of oratory in the twentieth century.
In his later years Faulkner completed the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Revel), won two Pulitzer Prizes for A Fable (1955) and The Reivers (1962), and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. He died on July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi. Today he is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, a writer who proved that the particular soil of one small Southern county could yield stories of universal and inexhaustible meaning.
Faulkner Quotes on Writing and the Artist's Duty
William Faulkner's reflections on writing and the artist's duty were articulated most memorably in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he declared that the writer's duty is to help humanity "endure and prevail" by reminding readers of "the old verities and truths of the heart." Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897 and raised in Oxford, Faulkner created the fictional Yoknapatawpha County as the setting for most of his major novels, populating it with interconnected families whose stories spanned generations of Southern history from the antebellum era through the twentieth century. His experimental techniques — stream of consciousness, multiple narrators, fractured chronology — in novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) pushed the boundaries of what the novel could achieve. Despite struggling for commercial success for much of his career, Faulkner was recognized with the Nobel Prize at age fifty-three, an honor that validated his relentless artistic ambition. These quotes on writing reflect the creative philosophy of a man who viewed literature as nothing less than a record of the human heart in conflict with itself.
"The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart."
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech — Stockholm, December 10, 1950
"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."
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech — Stockholm, December 10, 1950
"The young man or woman writing today has forgotten 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."
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech — Stockholm, December 10, 1950
"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write."
The Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1968
"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 Paris Review, Issue 12, "The Art of Fiction No. 12," 1956
"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."
The Paris Review, Issue 12, "The Art of Fiction No. 12," 1956
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."
Faulkner at the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–1958
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
The Paris Review, Issue 12, "The Art of Fiction No. 12," 1956
"Unless it comes out of your heart, writing is dead. It is the heart which drives the complexity of the craft."
Faulkner at the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–1958
Faulkner Quotes on Memory, Time, and the South
Faulkner's treatment of memory, time, and the American South created a literary world in which the past is never safely buried but continues to haunt and shape the present. His 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!, which reconstructed the rise and fall of the plantation owner Thomas Sutpen through multiple contradictory narrators, is considered one of the most complex and rewarding works of modernist fiction. The novel's exploration of how Southerners construct and reconstruct their history anticipated postmodern historiography by decades. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga — encompassing fifteen novels and dozens of short stories — examined race, class, and moral decay in the post-Civil War South with a depth that made him the region's most important literary chronicler. His statement that "the past is never dead — it's not even past" has become one of the most quoted lines in American literature, invoked in contexts ranging from legal proceedings to political speeches. These quotes on memory and time reflect the Southern Gothic sensibility of a writer who understood that historical trauma does not fade but accumulates.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
Requiem for a Nun, 1951 — Act I, Scene III
"I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."
The Paris Review, Issue 12, "The Art of Fiction No. 12," 1956
"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."
Absalom, Absalom!, 1936 — Shreve McCannon to Quentin Compson
"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
Light in August, 1932 — Chapter 6
"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."
The Sound and the Fury, 1929 — Quentin Compson's section
"No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors."
Intruder in the Dust, 1948
"To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi."
Attributed — Widely quoted from Faulkner's interviews on regionalism
"Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain."
The Wild Palms, 1939 — Harry Wilbourne's final words
Faulkner Quotes on the Human Heart, Courage, and Endurance
Faulkner's faith in the endurance of the human heart sustained a literary career marked by periods of both brilliance and neglect. During the 1930s and 1940s, when his novels were largely out of print, he supported himself by writing screenplays in Hollywood, contributing to films including To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946) for director Howard Hawks. The publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner in 1946 revived critical interest in his work and led directly to his Nobel Prize four years later. His later novels, including A Fable (1954), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Reivers (1962), his final novel published the month before his death, demonstrated a mellower but still ambitious artistic vision. These quotes on courage and the human heart capture the essential optimism that sustained Faulkner through decades of financial struggle and critical indifference, his belief that the human spirit is ultimately indestructible.
"He made the books and he died. 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."
The Paris Review, Issue 12, "The Art of Fiction No. 12," 1956
"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore."
Attributed — Frequently cited from Faulkner's reflections on creative risk
"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed."
Address to the graduating class — University High School, Oxford, Mississippi, 1951
"I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp."
Attributed — On the discipline of daily writing
"The basest of all things is to be afraid."
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech — Stockholm, December 10, 1950
"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure."
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech — Stockholm, December 10, 1950
"There is no such thing as was -- only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow."
The Paris Review, Issue 12, "The Art of Fiction No. 12," 1956
"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."
Faulkner at the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–1958
Frequently Asked Questions about William Faulkner Quotes
What did William Faulkner say about the human heart in conflict with itself?
Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950, one of the most quoted speeches in literary history, declared that the only subject worthy of great literature is 'the human heart in conflict with itself,' and that the writer's duty is to help humanity 'endure and prevail' by reminding readers of the courage, honor, hope, pride, compassion, and sacrifice that make human life meaningful even in an age of nuclear anxiety. This philosophy pervades his fiction: his characters struggle with competing loyalties to family and individual conscience, to racial solidarity and moral truth, to the weight of the past and the demands of the present. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional Mississippi landscape where most of his novels are set, serves as a microcosm of the American South's tragic history — slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the persistence of racial injustice — and his characters' moral struggles reflect the broader American struggle to reconcile its democratic ideals with its history of racial violence.
What are William Faulkner's most famous quotes on writing and time?
Faulkner's observation that 'the past is never dead — it's not even past' from 'Requiem for a Nun' (1951) has become one of the most quoted sentences in American literature because it captures a truth that extends far beyond the American South: that history shapes the present in ways that cannot be escaped through denial or forgetting. His narrative technique enacts this philosophy: his novels move fluidly between past and present, sometimes within a single sentence, creating a reading experience in which time is not linear but layered, with past events pressing upon present consciousness with the full weight of their unresolved consequences. Faulkner's approach to writing was famously intense: he often wrote in concentrated bursts, fueled by whiskey and sustained by the conviction that he was engaged in work of the highest importance. His advice to writers — 'read, read, read. Read everything' — and his ranking of his contemporaries (placing Thomas Wolfe above Hemingway because Wolfe was willing to risk failure) reveal a writer who valued ambition and courage above technical polish.
How did William Faulkner create the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County?
Faulkner's creation of Yoknapatawpha County — a fictional Mississippi county that he called 'my apocryphal county' and of which he declared himself 'sole owner and proprietor' — represents one of the most ambitious achievements in the history of fiction. Over the course of nineteen novels and dozens of short stories, he created a complete social world with its own geography, history, and interconnected families spanning from the era of Native American habitation through the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century. The county's major families — the aristocratic Compsons and Sartorises, the poor-white Snopeses, the enslaved and later emancipated Beauchamps — represent different social strata and moral orientations, and their interactions across generations create a fictional history as rich and complex as any actual county's. Faulkner's four greatest novels — 'The Sound and the Fury' (1929), 'As I Lay Dying' (1930), 'Light in August' (1932), and 'Absalom, Absalom!' (1936) — were all written in an extraordinary burst of creativity during a seven-year period and are now recognized as among the supreme achievements of twentieth-century literature.
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