BORN ON THIS DAY: William Faulkner (author, winner of Nobel Peace Prize, poet laureate b. 1897)

On this most auspicious occasion, I would like to share Mr. Faulkner's advice to writers.  It is my fervent intention that his words will renew our minds and pens and allow us to carry on in this maddeningly competitive world. Here are just a few of the passages that have inspired me again and again.  I hope that you will take something away as well.

Faulkner said that "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself […] alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner

“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's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. ”
― William Faulkner

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. ”
― William Faulkner

“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.”
― William Faulkner

“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

“All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.”
― William Faulkner