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William Faulkner Quotes

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Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

William Faulkner
Truth, Honesty, Lying

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

William Faulkner
Drama, Taken, Past

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

William Faulkner
Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

William Faulkner
Trying, Can Do

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

William Faulkner
Imagination, Three, Source

Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.

William Faulkner
Suicide, Home, Men

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

William Faulkner
Life, Honesty, Now And Then

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
Inspirational, Life, Motivational
"William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

William Faulkner
Inspirational, Running, Dream

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

William Faulkner
Men, Giving, Littles
William Faulkner (1994). “Novels 1942-1954”

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

William Faulkner
Time, Doe, Clock
William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.87, Modern Library

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

William Faulkner
Mistake, Errors, People
"William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

William Faulkner
Stories, Ifs

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

William Faulkner
Long, Life Is, Process

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. 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 Faulkner
Writing, Epic, Study

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
Children, Blue, Color
"William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

William Faulkner
Reality, World, Firsts

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

William Faulkner
Depression, Pain, Numbness

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.

William Faulkner
Helping, Scared
William Faulkner (2011). “Big Woods: The Hunting Stories”, p.26, Vintage

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

William Faulkner
Inspiration, Goes On, Wonder
William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.79, Modern Library

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

William Faulkner
Fiction, Journalism, Newspapers

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

William Faulkner
Thank You, Thanksgiving, Gratitude
"Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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.

William Faulkner
Truth, Honesty, Simple

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

William Faulkner
Love, Faults, Virtue

Try to be better than yourself.

William Faulkner
Trying
"William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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