Quote

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

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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
Never
Write
Spells
Stills
Quit
Still
Quitting
Take
Hot
Writing
Rule
Going
Easier
Good
Dead
Exhaust
Always
Trouble
Spell

More quotes by William Faulkner

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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
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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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What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.
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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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If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
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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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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.
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Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
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Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels only when the clock stops does time come to life.
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A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.
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...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
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The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
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It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
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Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
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...and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, 'Thank God for nothing.'
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Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
William Faulkner
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...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
William Faulkner
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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
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