The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
WILLIAM FAULKNERAll of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
More William Faulkner Quotes
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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 -
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.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Try to be better than yourself.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
All l mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Who gathers the withered rose?
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.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
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 -
History is not was, it is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories.
WILLIAM FAULKNER