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

— William Faulkner

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

— William Faulkner

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

— William Faulkner

Fear is the most damnable damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

— William Faulkner

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

— William Faulkner

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

— William Faulkner

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

— William Faulkner

Government was founded on the working premises of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.

— William Faulkner

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.

— William Faulkner

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear.

— William Faulkner