Quote

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

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
People
Artist
Hole
Toughen
Spirit
Frustration
Gutter
Littles
Holes
Sharpen
Live
Artists
Gutters
Little
Strength
Fortitude
Need
Trouble
Rats
Mean
Happy
Endurance
Needs
Learn
Vegetables

More quotes by William Faulkner

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Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
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I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
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A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
William Faulkner
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The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
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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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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When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
William Faulkner
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My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner
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This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
William Faulkner
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Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.
William Faulkner
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It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
William Faulkner
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Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
William Faulkner
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Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words
William Faulkner
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It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
William Faulkner
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Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
William Faulkner
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Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
William Faulkner
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Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
William Faulkner
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The reason I don't like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.
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