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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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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
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More quotes by William Faulkner

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How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
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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.
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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.
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Poor man. Poor mankind.
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With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.
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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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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
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Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
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Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
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I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.
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So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
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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.
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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.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
William Faulkner
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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
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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
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War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
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I am not one of those women who can stand things.
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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.
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This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
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