Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.
WILLIAM FAULKNERBe scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.
More William Faulkner Quotes
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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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I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.
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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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The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
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I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it.
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Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.
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One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat…nor make love for eight hours…
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It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.
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History is not was, it is.
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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.
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Read, read read. Read everything.
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Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.
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Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.
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The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement.
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Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.
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I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
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Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
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Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death.
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To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
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There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
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Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
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The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
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And sure enough, even waiting will end…if you can just wait long enough.
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The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
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Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER