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
talking people one-day
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
writing men talking
'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.
men rocks talking
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
pride talking long
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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.
common nicknames people
Nicknames are vulgar. Only common people use them.