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
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.
beautiful woman women
The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement
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.
unable
Some things you must always be unable to bear.
best good landlord mornings time
Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
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.
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.
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.