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A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
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
Truth
Writing
Congenitally
Writes
Unable
Writer
Fiction
Call
Tell
More quotes by William Faulkner
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
Read, read read. Read everything.
William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
William Faulkner
An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
William Faulkner
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
William Faulkner
There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.
William Faulkner
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...
William Faulkner
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.
William Faulkner
I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
William Faulkner
Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner
As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
William Faulkner
Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
William Faulkner
...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
William Faulkner
Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
William Faulkner
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.
William Faulkner
Love doesn't die the men and women do.
William Faulkner