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
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong 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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Soul, Authors & Writing
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
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don’t really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of 11 has not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it. His ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Virtue
Do not talk about disgrace from a thing being known, when the disgrace is, that the thing should exist.
—William Faulkner
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
A gentleman can live through anything.
—William Faulkner
You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing
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
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: Fighting, Quarrels, Fight
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Grief
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers
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: Literature, Reading, Books
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Reading, Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing, Books
When ideas come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Simplicity
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
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Facts
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
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Time Management
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Fear
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
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: Fail, Perfection, Mistake, Perfect, Failure, Dream
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: Art, Literature, Books
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
—William Faulkner
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
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
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
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
When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Ability
The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Suffering
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
Bernard Malamud American Novelist
John Steinbeck American Novelist
Toni Morrison American Novelist
Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
William Styron American Novelist
Pearl S. Buck American Novelist
Nelson Algren American Novelist