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No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

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
Humanitarian
Write
Firsts
First
Writing
Men

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All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
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And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
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He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
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By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
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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?
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You have to write badly in order to write well.
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One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.
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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.
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The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
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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.
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Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
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Poor man. Poor mankind.
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I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
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A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
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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.
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There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
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And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
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The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
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