Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
WILLIAM FAULKNERThe good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
More William Faulkner Quotes
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The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
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All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
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The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
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 -
If there is a God what the hell is He for?
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right.
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So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.
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Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
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…
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.
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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.
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Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
WILLIAM FAULKNER