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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.

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
Read
Young
Book
Return
Men
Ones
Loved
Knew
Books
Friends

More quotes by William Faulkner

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To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
William Faulkner
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There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.
William Faulkner
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I listen to the voices.
William Faulkner
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport he is a Kentuckian too.
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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Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
William Faulkner
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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?
William Faulkner
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People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
William Faulkner
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You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
William Faulkner
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It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.
William Faulkner
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I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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The past isn't over. It isn't even past.
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.
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.
William Faulkner
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Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
William Faulkner
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Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
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
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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