"any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man"
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Quote collection
William Faulkner quotes (page 12 of 20)
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A gentleman can live through anything."
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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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"The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
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"Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature."
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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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"If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time"
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"I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are."
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"We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always."
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"Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash."
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"Idleness breeds our better virtues."
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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."
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"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it."
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"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique."
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"a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from."
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"The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene."
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"Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?"
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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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"God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet."
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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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