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The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

William Faulkner

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William Faulkner
Age: 64 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 25
Died: 1962
Died: July 6
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New Albany
Mississippi
William Cuthbert Faulkner
William Falkner
William Cuthbert Falkner
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Reviews
Artist
Critics
Write
Criticism
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Writers
Art
Hollywood
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Time
Ones
Powerful

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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
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Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
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I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
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It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
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The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
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Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
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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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Teach yourself by your own mistakes people learn only by error.
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Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
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We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.
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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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And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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The writer's only responsibility is to his art...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.
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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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When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
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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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A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
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