Quote

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.

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
Writing
Maybe
Novelists
Trying
Story
Failed
Every
Write
Poet
Form
Failing
Stories
Short
Doe
Poetry
Novelist
Firsts
Novel
Demanding
Take
Wants
Tries

More quotes by William Faulkner

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It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
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An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
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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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When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
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Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
William Faulkner
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If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time
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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Caddy smelled like trees.
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It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.
William Faulkner
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Love doesn't die the men and women do.
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You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
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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.
William Faulkner
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A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
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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She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
William Faulkner
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I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.
William Faulkner
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You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
William Faulkner
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Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you
William Faulkner
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It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
William Faulkner
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A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
William Faulkner