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The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

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
Ideas
Dictates
Necessity
Creates
Material
Materials
Style
Written
Idea

More quotes by William Faulkner

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Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.
William Faulkner
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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
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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.
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Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
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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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People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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Who gathers the withered rose?
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How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
William Faulkner
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I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
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I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
William Faulkner
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
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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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My, my. A body does get around.
William Faulkner
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You have to write badly in order to write well.
William Faulkner
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True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
William Faulkner
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Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
William Faulkner
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Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
William Faulkner
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In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
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