1. “Don’t be ‘a writer’ but instead be writing. Being ‘a writer’ means being stagnant. The act of writing shows movement, activity, life. When you stop moving, you’re dead. It’s never too soon to start writing, as soon as you learn to read.”
2. “Keep it amateur. You’re not writing for money but for pleasure. It should be fun. And it should be exciting.”
3. “There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.”
4. “I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says.”
5. “You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical.”
6. ““Ninety-nine percent talent . . . ninety-nine percent discipline . . . ninety-nine percent work. [A good novelist] must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.”
7. “The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again.”
8. ““I did not develop [my style]. I think style is one of the tools of the craft, and I think anyone that spends too much of his time about his style, developing a style, or following a style, probably hasn’t got much to say and knows it and is afraid of it, and so he writes a style, a marvelous trove.”
9. “ “I doubt if there can be any rule about [long titles]. I think that anything, the shorter it’s said the better. I think that—that stories title themselves quite often. Yes, in that anything, the shorter it’s said the better it is.”
10. “All of us failed to match our dream of perfection.”
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born September 25, 1897, New Albany, Mississippi, U.S. And died July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Mississippi, U.S. Faulkner was an American writer best known for, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, A Rose for Emily, and many more. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He won the literature in 1949, Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1955 and 1963, and National Book Award in 1951 and 1955.
“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” ~ William Faulkner
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