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It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
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
Enough
Behind
Pencil
Writing
Move
Pencils
Trying
Feet
Stands
Long
Says
Begins
Moving
Paper
Keep
Usually
Doe
Behinds
Character
Along
Trot
More quotes by William Faulkner
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
William Faulkner
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
William Faulkner
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
William Faulkner
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
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
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.
William Faulkner
I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.
William Faulkner
If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
William Faulkner
I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
William Faulkner
Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
William Faulkner
I will never lie again.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
William Faulkner
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
William Faulkner
I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
William Faulkner
I decline to accept the end of man.
William Faulkner
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
The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.
William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
William Faulkner