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If a story is in you, it has to come out.

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
Story
Stories
Come

More quotes by William Faulkner

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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
William Faulkner
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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience
William Faulkner
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I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
William Faulkner
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No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
William Faulkner
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I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
William Faulkner
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Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.
William Faulkner
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport he is a Kentuckian too.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
William Faulkner
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Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
William Faulkner
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You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
William Faulkner
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...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
William Faulkner
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The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
William Faulkner