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
You can't. You just have to.
people clean swiss
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
inspiration saws heard
I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
writing order wells
You have to write badly in order to write well.
trying periods caps
I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
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.
liars lying men
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
telling-the-truth individual
No one individual can tell the truth.
passion world purity
Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
drama taken past
The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
men lines social
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
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.
heaven poetry earth
True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.