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
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.
reality rocks maelstrom
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
dream pain reality
I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized
reality firsts world
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
artist endure hearts help lift work
The work of the artist is to lift up peoples hearts and help them endure
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.
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.
help
Well, it's like this. I ain't got to but I can't help it.
believe man merely optimism
I believe that man will not merely endure; he will 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.
common nicknames people
Nicknames are vulgar. Only common people use them.
drink eat eight everybody himself hours love man miserable nor reason saddest
One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours --all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
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.