Daily Inspiration Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner frames artistry less as a calling than as a possession, and the move is characteristically Southern Gothic: creation as haunting, not self-help. “Driven by demons” doesn’t just romanticize suffering; it strips the artist of clean agency. The “creature” phrasing is doing sly work here, downgrading the artist from heroic genius to something half-feral, compelled, perhaps even a little embarrassing in its need. In Faulkner’s world, people don’t simply choose their fates; they inherit them, endure them, and then try to make a story sturdy enough to hold the damage.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “He doesn’t know why they choose him” punctures the comforting narrative that talent is a merit badge earned through virtue or intention. The demon chooses; the artist gets chosen. That’s an anti-mystical mysticism: less divine inspiration than arbitrary affliction. It’s also a neat alibi. If the work is a compulsion, then the cost it extracts - obsession, neglect, ruin - becomes less a moral failure than collateral.

Then Faulkner lands the real punchline: the artist is “usually too busy to wonder why.” The subtext is craft, not martyrdom. Whatever the demons are - trauma, ambition, libido, memory, shame - the only dignified response is labor. Faulkner, who wrote with punishing discipline while wrestling alcoholism and the weight of history, is insisting that the myth of inspiration matters less than the day-to-day brutality of making sentences behave. The demons don’t explain the work; they just keep the lights on.