Literary Birthday – 25 September – William Faulkner

William Faulkner was born on 25 September 1897 and died on 6 July 1962.

William Faulkner Quotes

1. Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
2. The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
3. If a story is in you, it has to come out.
4. 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.
5. It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.
6. In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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: honour, 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.
11. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
12. 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 was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate who became one of the most important figures in Southern literature. He set many of his novels in the fictional Southern community of Yoknapatawpha County, using experimental techniques such as stream-of-consciousness and unreliable narrators. His work often examined the burden of history, racial injustice, family conflict, and the decline of traditional Southern society. His novels, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!, are considered major works of Southern Gothic literature. During the 1930s, Faulkner worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He contributed to To Have and Have Not, adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s novel, and co-wrote The Blue Lamp with Raymond Chandler. To Have and Have Not is notable for bringing together contributions from two future Nobel laureates, Faulkner and Hemingway. Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for his ‘powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel’. He continued to write fiction, publishing A Fable in 1954 and his final novel, The Reivers, in 1962. Both novels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1951, the French government awarded him the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. His novels and narrative techniques have continued to influence generations of writers.

Image: United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3f06403.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_Van_Vechten_-_William_Faulkner.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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