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
unable
Some things you must always be unable to bear.
anguished bad book deliberate failed force four grew mother moved none printed reason relinquish start tenderness throw time tour trying wrote
And that's how the book grew. That is, I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed it in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed, but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away, like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, But she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.
beautiful woman women
The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement
color considered few fourth hack intrigue literary local proven rate skeletons sufficient tricked writer
A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven "sure-fire" literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
amoral anybody artist busy chose creature driven everybody steal wonder work
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
There is no such thing as was -- only is.
believe man merely optimism
I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
wise women trying
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
trying
Try to be better than yourself.
baptists ulysses old-testament
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
writing language-words joy
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
feminine cringe ifs
Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you
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.
dog struggle thinking
She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling