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I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite 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
Materials
Unless
Sure
Better
Rewrite
Express
Material
Absolutely
More quotes by William Faulkner
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
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
William Faulkner
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
William Faulkner
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
William Faulkner
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
William Faulkner
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
William Faulkner
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
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
William Faulkner
Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
William Faulkner
She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
William Faulkner
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
William Faulkner
Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
William Faulkner
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.
William Faulkner
The writer's only responsibility is to his art.
William Faulkner
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
William Faulkner
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
William Faulkner
Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.
William Faulkner
A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
William Faulkner
Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner
You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
William Faulkner