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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

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Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
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The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.
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Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
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The writer's only responsibility is to his art.
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An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
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It's because I'm alone.. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
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Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
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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.
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War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
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One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...
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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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An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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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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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.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
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We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.
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Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
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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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In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
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