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. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art. ✨ William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12. Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.
More Author Quotes
- All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible. ✨ 1956 On his generation of writers. Interview in Paris Review, Spring.
- Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least. ✨ William Faulkner (1985). Light in August, Vintage
- Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long. ✨ William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury, W. W. Norton & Company
- I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period. ✨ William Faulkner, Joseph Leo Blotner (1978). Selected letters of William Faulkner, Vintage
- It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt … ▶
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