Art & Creativity Quote by William Faulkner

A writer doesn’t just make art in Faulkner’s world; he makes a mess. "Everything goes by the board" is nautical language for throwing cargo overboard to keep the ship afloat, and Faulkner weaponizes it: the book becomes the vessel, survival the priority, ethics the ballast you jettison when the water starts coming in. The blunt inventory - honor, pride, decency - reads like a courtroom roll call of virtues, each one dismissed as expendable. It’s funny in the darkest way: decency, last on the list, gets treated like an optional accessory.

Faulkner’s intent isn’t to romanticize the "tortured artist" so much as to admit the ugly mechanics behind literary ambition. The subtext is transactional: to write something that matters, you will bargain with parts of yourself you thought were nonnegotiable. That bargain includes stealing time from family, exploiting lived experience (yours and other people’s), nurturing obsession, even courting a kind of moral tunnel vision where the only virtue left is finishing. "Get the book written" lands with the cold finality of a production order. Not write well. Not tell the truth. Get it done.

Context matters: Faulkner wrote under financial pressure, worked in Hollywood, drank hard, and built a career out of turning private Southern rot into public spectacle. The line carries his era’s masculinity, too - pride and honor as inherited currencies - only to declare them useless against the imperative of making the work. It’s a confession, a dare, and a warning: the book will cost you, and you may not like the account it keeps.