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You have to write badly in order to write well.

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
Badly
Write
Order
Wells
Well

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Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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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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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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I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
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A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.
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the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
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The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
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History is not was, it is.
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Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
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I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.
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All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
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The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
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I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.
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Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
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The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
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For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
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The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
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We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.
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