"Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else."
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Quote collection
William Faulkner quotes (page 5 of 20)
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others."
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"There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality."
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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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"Only when the clock stops does time come to life"
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"I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you."
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"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
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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. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass."
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"...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life."
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"No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors."
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"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
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"We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."
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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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"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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"It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart."
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"There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others."
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"Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words."
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"The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself"
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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. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art."
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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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