William Faulkner Quotes
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When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.
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Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
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She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
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One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...
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The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
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I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
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The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
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In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.
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…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.
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It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
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Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.
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When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
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A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
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I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized.
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The poets are wrong of course. But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
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The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
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A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….
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There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
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Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
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You have to write badly in order to write well.
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Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.