When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
Interpretation
Good writing arises from the inner conflicts of the human heart, which are fundamental to the human experience.
William Faulkner suggests that the essence of meaningful writing lies in the struggles and contradictions within a person's character and emotions. These internal conflicts resonate deeply with readers, as they reflect the complexities of life and the human condition, making such writing invaluable and worthy of effort.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop, to inspire students, this quote can emphasize the importance of personal struggles in storytelling.
When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
The pleasure of making things beautiful or useful involves your feelings as well as your thinking. When your original sketch evolves into a tangible, three-dimensional object, your heart is anxiously following the process of your work. And the love involved in making it is conveyed to those for whom you made it.
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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