William Faulkner

William Faulkner

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good."
90 Quotes
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good."
William Faulkner
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"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
William Faulkner
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"If a story is in you, it has to come out."
William Faulkner
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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."
William Faulkner
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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."
William Faulkner
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"“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”"
William Faulkner The Wild Palms
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"The displacement of water is equal to the something of something."
William Faulkner
"One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours."
William Faulkner
"The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful and it's best to take the gesture the shadow of the branch and let the mind create the tree."
William Faulkner
"The past is never dead-it is not even past."
William Faulkner
"When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't."
William Faulkner
"The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business."
William Faulkner
"Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people."
William Faulkner
"I decline to accept the end of men... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
William Faulkner
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
William Faulkner
"Fear is the most damnable damaging thing to human personality in the whole world."
William Faulkner
"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection."
William Faulkner
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
William Faulkner
"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."
William Faulkner
"We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid."
William Faulkner
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