William Faulkner Quotes
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Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
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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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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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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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Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.
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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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Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
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All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.
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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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I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
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It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
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She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
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A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.
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The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
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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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I am not one of those women who can stand things.
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Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
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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.
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
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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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A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.