William Faulkner, the great southern writer, said, in his Speech of Acceptance for the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature:
There are no longer problems of the spirit…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…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 the glands…Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man… The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
