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
ideas style should
The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
writing ideas fiction
With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.
opportunity names ideas
People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
beautiful men ideas
Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
writing ideas simplicity
When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.
There is no such thing as was -- only is.
further harder longer point reached risk seem
Even at sixty-two, I can still go harder and further and longer than some of the others. That is, I seem to have reached the point where all I have to risk is just my bones.
artist endure hearts help lift work
The work of the artist is to lift up peoples hearts and help them endure
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.
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.
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.
believe man merely optimism
I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
anywhere love perhaps putting
Perhaps they were right in putting love into books, . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.