Quote

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

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
America
Excuse
Behavior
Europe
Artist
Form

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Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
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Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
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I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
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She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
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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 best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
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So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.
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The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
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In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
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...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
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Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
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Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
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Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
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The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
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A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don't square.
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A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
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The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews the artists who want to write, don't.
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Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
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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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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.
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