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
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Dreams
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
When ideas come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Simplicity
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Gratitude
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, Trouble
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: Dreams, Perfection, Failure, Failures, Possibilities, Mistakes
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Art
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
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Christians, Christianity
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Mankind, Man
You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won t.
—William Faulkner
Topics: America
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
Topics: Weight
The sacred lamp of day
Now dipt in western clouds his parting day.
—William Faulkner
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Independence, Freedom
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
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
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: Art, Writers, Authors & Writing
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Patience
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
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: Kindness, Optimism
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers, Art
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Time Management
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
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Time, Time Management, Adversity
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
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
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers
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