William Faulkner Quotes
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The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.
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A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.
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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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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.
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A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
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You can't. You just have to.
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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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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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Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
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She was the captain of her soul.
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She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
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Caddy smelled like trees.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
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We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.
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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
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The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
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A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
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Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.
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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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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.