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Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

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
Therefore
State
Nature
States
Purity
Contrary
Negative

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Try to be better than yourself.
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An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
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Wonder. Go on and wonder.
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That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
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Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
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In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.
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This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
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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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There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.
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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.
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Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.
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...and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, 'Thank God for nothing.'
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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
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The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.
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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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It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.
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Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
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You can't. You just have to.
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