William Faulkner

Oh yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will be already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning.

I decline to accept the end of man.

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.

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

You cant understand it [the South]. You would have to be born there.

JEFFERSON, YOKNAPATAWPHA CO., Mississippi. Area, 2400 Square Miles. Population, Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. WILLIAM FAULKNER, Sole Owner & Proprietor.

Why do you hate the South?

I dont hate it. . . . I dont hate it. . . . I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

Too much happens. . . . Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. . . . That’s what’s so terrible.

They [the Negroes] will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion—not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian.

What’s wrong with this world is, it’s not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it, and it works.”

One of the saddest things is that the only thing 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.

Truth—that long clean clear simple undeviable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the 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.

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer- ciable ones of the human spirit.

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.

An artist is a creature driven by demons— he usually doesn’t know why they chose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.

We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job.

Business is always interfering with pleasure, but it makes other pleasures possible.

No man is a failure who is enjoying life.

If people liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs.

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.

I believe that man will not merely endure he will prevail.

Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

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.

We give advice by the bucket but take it by the grain.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world . . . would do this, it would change the earth.

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.

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.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.