Mississippi Quote of the Day: William Faulkner on Failure

Oxford novelist William Faulkner, winner of both the Nobel Prize and two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, was never truly satisfied with anything he wrote. And that’s the way it should be, he believed.
His classic novel, “The Sound and the Fury,” is widely considered one of the greatest in the English language. The tragic decline and downfall of the once-proud Compson family – the alcoholic and deeply depressed father, the mentally challenged Benjy, the obsessive and suicidal Quentin, their alluring but enigmatic and emotionally distant sister Caddy – was a timeless and still resonant allegory of the American South, the fabled “Lost Cause” and a proud people’s inability to come to terms with the mistakes of history. 
Yet Faulkner called “The Sound and the Fury” a “most splendid failure.” It’s a remark that has been misunderstood by many. To Faulkner, failure was not such a bad thing, as he makes clear in this quote:
“All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I’m convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t.”