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
agony award create exist glory human materials mine spirit sweat work
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust.
absorb apprentice carpenter good studies throw works
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 is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.
artist endure hearts help lift work
The work of the artist is to lift up peoples hearts and help them endure
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.
work men eight
One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat ... nor make love for eight hours.
funny work men
It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
help
Well, it's like this. I ain't got to but I can't help it.
easiest express means music pure since words
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express . . . but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure must would have done better.
past
The past is never forgotten; it's never even past
hundred miles
Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.
thank-you thanksgiving gratitude
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
men voice needs
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
acting believe courage decency found greatest help meeting problem self-esteem whatever words
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and selfrespect 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.
anywhere love perhaps putting
Perhaps they were right in putting love into books, . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.