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The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.

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
True
Reason
Even

More quotes by William Faulkner

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I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
William Faulkner
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I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
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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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
William Faulkner
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Did you ever have a sister? did you?
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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Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
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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He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
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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A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
William Faulkner
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
William Faulkner
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The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
William Faulkner
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Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
William Faulkner
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The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.
William Faulkner
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You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
William Faulkner
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It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours he can't drink for eight hours he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
William Faulkner
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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
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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
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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
William Faulkner