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My, my. A body does get around.
William Faulkner -
Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
William Faulkner
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It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
William Faulkner -
Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
William Faulkner -
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.
William Faulkner -
You men,' she says. 'You durn men.
William Faulkner -
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
William Faulkner -
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner -
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
William Faulkner -
When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.
William Faulkner -
It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
William Faulkner -
You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.
William Faulkner -
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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.
William Faulkner
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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 -
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner -
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
William Faulkner -
I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
William Faulkner -
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
William Faulkner -
It's because I'm alone.. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
William Faulkner
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It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
William Faulkner -
Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
William Faulkner -
...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
William Faulkner -
I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.
William Faulkner