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William Faulkner

William Faulkner ( 1897 - 1962 ) was born in New Albany, Mississippi. He was the son of a family proud of their Southern heritage. He was to be one of the greatest American writers of all times and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

– William Faulkner

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All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

– William Faulkner

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Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

– William Faulkner

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Be scared. You cant help that. But dont be afraid. Aint nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

– William Faulkner

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Business is always interfering with pleasure, but it makes other pleasures possible.

– William Faulkner

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Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

– William Faulkner

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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

– William Faulkner

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I believe that man will not merely endure he will prevail.

– William Faulkner

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I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

– William Faulkner

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I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poets, the writers, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poets voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

– William Faulkner

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If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

– William Faulkner

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If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs.

– William Faulkner

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No man is a failure who is enjoying life.

– William Faulkner

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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. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

– William Faulkner

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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 eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours --all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

– William Faulkner

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Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, Not because they never found it, But because they didn't stop to enjoy it.

– William Faulkner

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Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.

– William Faulkner

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The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

– William Faulkner

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The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

– William Faulkner

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The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

– William Faulkner

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The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.

– William Faulkner

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The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

– William Faulkner

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The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

– William Faulkner

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The world is still, for she is old And many´s the bead of life she´s told. Her gossip there, the watching moon Views hill and stream and wave and dune

– William Faulkner

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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

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We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job.

– William Faulkner

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