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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
Really
Simple
Poets
Always
Natural
Instinct
Hate
Poet
Speak
Interested
Facts
Courses
True
Course
Truth
Almost
Exalted
Even
Wrong
Terrified

More quotes by 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.
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This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
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Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
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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.
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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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I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
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One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.
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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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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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Well, Bud, he said, looking at me, I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?
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Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
William Faulkner
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I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
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We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
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Poor man. Poor mankind.
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