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They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.
William Faulkner -
I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.
William Faulkner
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
William Faulkner -
Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
William Faulkner -
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
William Faulkner -
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
William Faulkner -
It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
William Faulkner -
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
William Faulkner
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The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
William Faulkner -
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
William Faulkner -
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, 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. He must learn them again.
William Faulkner -
As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
William Faulkner -
The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
William Faulkner -
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
William Faulkner
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Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.
William Faulkner -
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
William Faulkner -
That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
William Faulkner -
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.
William Faulkner -
It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.
William Faulkner -
You have to write badly in order to write well.
William Faulkner
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
William Faulkner -
In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it.
William Faulkner -
Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?
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