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
writing famous-writers writers-reading
Read, read read. Read everything.
mexico memphis tennessee
Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico
marriage long rooms
Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
victory battle fool
No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
negative purity states
Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
creativity artist years
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.
running distance space
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
writing darling
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
virtue idleness
Idleness breeds our better virtues.
tree
Caddy smelled like trees.
morning writing men
It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.
rose withered
Who gathers the withered rose?
life thinking sorrow
A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.
dream art responsibility
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. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose 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. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.