William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American author of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He won not only the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature but also the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award twice.
Born near Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner dropped out of high school and took a few courses at the University of Mississippi, where he got a ‘D’ grade in English. He worked odd jobs as a house painter, dishwasher, and bootlegger. While working as an overnight supervisor at the University of Mississippi’s Old Power Plant, he wrote The Sound and The Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930.)
Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks between midnight and 4:00 AM while working at the power plant and sent it to his publisher without changing a word. Regarded his most famous novel, As I Lay Dying portrays a poor white family that accompanies a mother’s body across the state of Mississippi for burial.
Faulkner also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter for more than 50 films including To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946.)
Faulkner’s other novels include Sanctuary (1931,) Light in August (1932,) Absalom, Absalom! (1936,) The Unvanquished (1938,) The Wild Palms (1939,) The Hamlet (1940,) and Go Down, Moses (1942.) His works describe the history and the legends of the American South and have a strong impression of a society in decline.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Faulkner
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Gratitude
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Conscience
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Critics, Criticism
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Freedom
Do not talk about disgrace from a thing being known, when the disgrace is, that the thing should exist.
—William Faulkner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Gratitude
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.
—William Faulkner
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Books, Reading, Literature
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Difficulty
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Ability, Adversity
The past is never dead, it is not even past.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Past, Memory, Reflection
Be scared. You cant help that. But don’t be afraid. Aint nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
—William Faulkner
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Time Management
I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of kindness and compassion.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Optimism, Kindness
The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Suffering
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree.
—William Faulkner
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.
—William Faulkner
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Art, Authors & Writing
All of us have failed to reach our dream of perfection, so I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Perfection, Failure
The great weight of the ship may indeed prevent her from acquiring her greatest velocity; but when she has attained it, she will advance by her own intrinsic motion, without gaining any new degree of velocity, or lessening what she has acquired.
—William Faulkner
When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Ability
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect 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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Beliefs
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing, Art
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Patience
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Perfection, Dreams, Mistakes, Failures, Failure, Possibilities
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Fear
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Dreams
Maybe it was because like not only finds like; it can’t even escape from being found by its like. Even when it’s just like in one thing, because even them two with the same like was different.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Perception
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Experience
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