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"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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"I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show."

"Scotland consistently produces world-class writers."

"A writer writesregardless...even though...notwithstanding...despite...at any rate...anyhow...nevertheless...in the face of...undeterred by...heedless of...and because.The true writer simply continues to write."

"What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true."

"If you want to be a good writer, internalize the good writers; absorb them; integrate with their souls; embrace their minds; mingle with their life stories; in short, merge with them, lose yourself in them!"

"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."

"Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain."
Explore more quotes by William Faulkner


"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable."


"Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed."


"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."


"It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence."


"Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... Perhaps it could not live anywhere else."


"Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people."


"Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid."


"Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks."
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