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William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (25 September 1897 – 6 July 1962) was a novelist American novelist
Sourced
- Because no battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
- The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- 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 anymore than for pride or fear.
- Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words... -
- 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.
- Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
- Source: The Wild Palms (1939)
- The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
- Speech at the Nobel Prize Banquet after recieving the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950)
- I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal 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. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 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.
- Speech at the Nobel Prize Banquet after recieving the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950)
- The past is never dead. It's not even past.
- Source: Requiem for a Nun (1951)
- The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
- Source: Interview with Jean Stein
Attributed
- A gentleman can live through anything.
- A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
- A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
- A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
- A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
- A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
- All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
- Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
- An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
- Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
- Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
- Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
- Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
- I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
- I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
- If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
- If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
- I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
- It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
- Variant: You can't eat for eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours a day – all you can do for eight hours a day is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
- Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
- Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
- My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
- People need trouble— a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
- 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.
- The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
- The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
- The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
- The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
- There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
- This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
- To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
- Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
- The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
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