William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulknerwas an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 September 1897
CityNew Albany, MS
running artist blood
So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
writing men talking
'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.
mistake errors people
Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.
regret habit idle
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
lonely deep-water wind
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
moving reality bereavement
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
memories flesh bones
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
opportunity names ideas
People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
children emotional long
It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.
ideas style should
The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
three thousand three-words
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
reading writing crafts
That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
telling-the-truth individual
No one individual can tell the truth.
bells way strive
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.