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

More quotes by William Faulkner

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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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It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.
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I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
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She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling
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It's because I'm alone.. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
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...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
William Faulkner
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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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And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away
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It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
William Faulkner
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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
William Faulkner
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The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
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Our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere -- systems political or religious or racial or national -- will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
William Faulkner
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
William Faulkner
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The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.
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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Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.
William Faulkner
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Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
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Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
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