Today marks the birthday of William Faulkner (1897–1962,) the American author of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He won not only the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, but also the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award twice.
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 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 just 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.)
Inspirational Quotations by William Faulkner
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
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 (American Novelist)
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
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 (American Novelist)
The past is never dead, it is not even past.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
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 (American Novelist)
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 (American Novelist)
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
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 (American Novelist)
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)
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 (American Novelist)
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)