William Faulkner (1897-1962)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his childhood.

Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were 1930's As I Lay Dying and Light in August (1932).

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Quotes·Quotations by William Faulkner

Advice

¶ Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner

Will Smith (1968- )

Will Smith (1968- )

Willard Christopher "Will" Smith, Jr. (born September 25, 1968), also known by his stage name The Fresh Prince, is an American actor, producer, and rapper. He has enjoyed success in television, film and music. In April 2007, Newsweek called him the most powerful actor in Hollywood. Smith has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, two Academy Awards, and has won multiple Grammy Awards.

In the late 1980s, Smith achieved modest fame as a rapper under the name The Fresh Prince. In 1990, his popularity increased dramatically when he starred in the popular television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The show ran for nearly six years (1990–1996) on NBC and has been syndicated consistently on various networks since then. In the mid-1990s, Smith moved from television to film, and ultimately starred in numerous blockbuster films. He is the only actor to have eight consecutive films gross over $100 million in the domestic box office and the only one to have eight consecutive films in which he starred open at #1 spot in the domestic box office tally.

Fourteen of the nineteen fiction films he has acted in have accumulated worldwide gross earnings of over $100 million, and four took in over $500 million in global box office receipts. As of 2011, his films have grossed $5.7 billion in global box office. His most financially successful films have been Bad Boys, Bad Boys II, Independence Day, the Men in Black films, I, Robot, I Am Legend, Hancock, Wild Wild West, Enemy of the State, Shark Tale, Hitch, and Seven Pounds. He also earned critical praise for his performances in Six Degrees of Separation, Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness, receiving Best Actor Oscar nominations for the latter two.

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Quotes·Quotation by Will Smith


Will Smith as Alex Hitch Hitchens from Hitch (2005)

¶ Because that's what people do. They leap, and hope to God they can fly, because otherwise you just drop like a rock, wondering the whole way down, why in the hell did I jump? But here I am, Sarah, falling, and there's only one person who makes me feel like I can fly. It's you.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Smith