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
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Time Management
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: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
The past is never dead, it is not even past.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Past, Memory, Reflection
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
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Literature, Books, Art
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Work
When ideas come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Simplicity
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
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Authors & Writing, Books, Reading, Writing, Writers
A gentleman can live through anything.
—William Faulkner
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Patience
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
I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man’s abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Reading
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Horses
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Racism
People between 20 and 40 are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do-after 40. Between 20 and 40 the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not yet begun to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between 20 and 40.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Age
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
Do not talk about disgrace from a thing being known, when the disgrace is, that the thing should exist.
—William Faulkner
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Facts
If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
—William Faulkner
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Freedom, Independence
When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Ability
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
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 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
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Pain, Experience
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, Mistakes, Possibilities
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Fear
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. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Humanity
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
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
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Quarrels, Fighting, Fight
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Art, Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
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: Trouble, Difficulty
The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Suffering
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, Art, Arts
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
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
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