William Faulkner Quotes
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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.
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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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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.
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Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
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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.
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If there is a God what the hell is He for?
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The past is never dead. It's not even past.
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You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
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When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.
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You men,' she says. 'You durn men.
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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
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...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
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I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
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Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
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We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.
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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.
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Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
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We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license - until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall.