Beginning of a 20″ x 26″ pastel painting

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

All of us fail to match our dream of perfection.  So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.  In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist.  That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off.  Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy.  Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide.  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 after poetry.  And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

William Faulkner in Writers at Work:  The Paris Review Interviews First Series

Comments are welcome!