“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
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”

"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
I have been reading this book all day, and it's been giving me a REALLY HARD TIME!! Faulkner's book is something that I have to force myself into, for his style of narration could be so confusing. However, as I read on, I begin to feel its beauty. Not read, but FEEL. One cannot judge this book merely by its literal meaning, becausethe most fascinating part is HOW he charged the language with meaning.
He said "Read, read, read. Read everything.... If it is good, you’ll find out." I am not so sensitive to English as I am to Chinese. I can't really tell what's good and what's bad, but I can FEEL what's music and what's noise.
And I could say that Faulkner writes music.
Why did he write such long paragraphs? Why did he omited the punctuation? Why did he use multiple narrators？ I don't know. I don't know. But it worked. It worked in such a subtle way, which I can't quite put my finger on. This is why one should never read Faulkner in Chinese, for even the most sophisticated translater cannot bring out the beauty between the lines. Yes, that's beauty. He is not trying to write beauty, but the beauty comes naturally out of the language itself.
Faulkner didn't simply master the story. He mastered THE LANGUAGE.

"Judith, giving implicit trust where she had given love, giving implicit love whereshe had derived breath and pride: that true pride, not that faulse kind which transforms what it does not at the moment understand into scorn and outrage and so ventsitself in pique and lacerations, but true pride which can say to itself without abasement: I love, I will accept no substitude; something has happened between him andmy father; if my father was right I will never see him again, if wrong he will comeor send for me; if happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can."
This is so cool.

“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing that, only then does he take up novel writing.” —William Faulkner

William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm
December 10, 1950
"Ladies and gentlemen,
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man,
but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not
for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of
the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only
mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part
of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would
like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle
from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated
to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some
day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by
now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There
is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man
or woman writing today has forgotten 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.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things
is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room
in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the
old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and
honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he
labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which
nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all,
without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no
scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and
watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough
to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last
dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be
one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not
merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a
soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The
poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege
to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and
honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been
the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man,
it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing
Company, Amsterdam, 1969