"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid"
About this Quote
Faulkner doesn’t romanticize bravery here; he weaponizes it. “A writer must teach himself” frames courage not as a trait you’re born with but as a discipline, the daily labor of refusing the easy exit. The shock word is “basest.” Fear isn’t merely inconvenient or human; it’s degrading, the thing that drags art down into politeness, mimicry, and safe performance. He’s talking about craft, but he’s also issuing a moral ultimatum: if you’re scared, you’ll lie.
The subtext is that fear is the invisible editor of most prose. It trims the messy sentence, softens the ugly insight, swaps specificity for generality. Fear makes you write toward approval - the market, the critics, the town, the family - instead of toward the thing that’s actually true. Faulkner’s best work is practically a case study in that refusal: fractured timelines, overheated interior voices, taboo desires, racial violence, inherited guilt. The novels don’t behave, because his subject matter can’t be told politely without becoming propaganda or nostalgia.
Context matters because Faulkner is a Southern modernist writing in the long hangover of the Civil War and the living horror of Jim Crow. To look directly at that world - its cruelty, its tenderness, its rot - meant risking social exile and aesthetic failure. His line makes fear “basest” because it’s the root vice that breeds all the others in art: sentimentality, self-censorship, and the cheap counterfeit of wisdom. He’s not praising recklessness. He’s demanding the one kind of self-control that matters: control over the impulse to flinch.
The subtext is that fear is the invisible editor of most prose. It trims the messy sentence, softens the ugly insight, swaps specificity for generality. Fear makes you write toward approval - the market, the critics, the town, the family - instead of toward the thing that’s actually true. Faulkner’s best work is practically a case study in that refusal: fractured timelines, overheated interior voices, taboo desires, racial violence, inherited guilt. The novels don’t behave, because his subject matter can’t be told politely without becoming propaganda or nostalgia.
Context matters because Faulkner is a Southern modernist writing in the long hangover of the Civil War and the living horror of Jim Crow. To look directly at that world - its cruelty, its tenderness, its rot - meant risking social exile and aesthetic failure. His line makes fear “basest” because it’s the root vice that breeds all the others in art: sentimentality, self-censorship, and the cheap counterfeit of wisdom. He’s not praising recklessness. He’s demanding the one kind of self-control that matters: control over the impulse to flinch.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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