Literary Birthday - 25 September 

Happy Birthday, William Faulkner, born 25 September 1897, died 6 July 1962

The Best 10 William Faulkner Quotes On Writing

1. The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
2. If a story is in you, it has to come out.
3. Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other. 
4. In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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. 
8. 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: honor, 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. 
9. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky. 
10. 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. Faulkner is one of the most important writers of Southern literature in the United States. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

by Amanda Patterson