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Be scared. You cant help that. But dont be afraid. Aint 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.
-William Faulkner
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Ability
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When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
-William Faulkner
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Action(s)
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The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
-William Faulkner
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Age
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People between 20 and 40 are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do-after 40. Between 20 and 40 the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not yet begun to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between 20 and 40.
-William Faulkner, interview in Writers at Work (1958)
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Ambition
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Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.
Try to be better than yourself.
-William Faulkner
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America
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If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t.
-William Faulkner
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Art
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An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
-William Faulkner
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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.
-William Faulkner
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Authors & Writing
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I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. 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.
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html
-William Faulkner, speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
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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.
-William Faulkner
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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
-William Faulkner
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I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
-William Faulkner
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If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
-William Faulkner
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The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
-William Faulkner
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My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
-William Faulkner
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Books
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The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
-William Faulkner
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Christianity
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No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
-William Faulkner
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Conscience
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A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
-William Faulkner
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Criticism
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The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
-William Faulkner
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Differences
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Maybe it was because like not only finds like; it can't even escape from being found by its like. Even when it's just like in one thing, because even them two with the same like was different.
-William Faulkner
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Difficulty
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People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
-William Faulkner
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Dreams
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The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
-William Faulkner
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Facts
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Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
-William Faulkner
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Failure
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All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
-William Faulkner
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Fight, Fighting
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The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
-William Faulkner
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Books by and about William Faulkner