All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
Source: Interview in Writers at Work by Malcolm Cowley, 1958.
-- William Faulkner, (Sep 25 1897-1962), US novelist; He wrote about a microcosm of the post-Civil War deep South in The Sound and the Fury, 1929.