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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

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
Darlings
Darling
Kill
Must
Writing

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It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
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To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
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I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
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So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
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If there is a God what the hell is He for?
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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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All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
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We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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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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They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
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You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
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If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time
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The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.
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I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
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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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ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
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Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.
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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.
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