Was it the most pretentious lunchtime conversation ever?

Interesting thoughts about William Faulkner today, regarding him discussing writing in general, and his own writing. It makes sense that Faulkner would revisit the act of writing in his writing. First off, he's a writer, and what do writers do? They write. So what ends up being rather imporant (I suspect) to authors? Yeah, probably writing.
Second, as a man (so I've been told) who was sometimes plagued by the problem of justifying his choice of lifestyle (that is, to write, instead of get a real job, he worried about whether he was Doing Something Worthwhile With His Life. At my lunchtime discussion of Faulkner a passage from Absalom, Absalom was pointed out. The act of writing becomes something permanent, something that will last, something that means something, even if it only means something because it happened, because it existed, for one moment, the product of a human being. Writing is powerful, a primal power, and I wouldn't be surprised if Faulkner wanted to stake out a bit of that power for himself.
Third, Faulkner was a modernist. And, like it or not, we're affected by the ideas of our time. For a lot of the modernists, art was the supreme calling and the artist a sort of priesthood. So Faulkner, creating art, and writing about writing, was in one sense creating sacred scriptures. Those ideas the artist felt important should be poured into art. Art is the manual by which we steer our lives.
I could be completely wrong, of course.
Anyway, compare my ideas with Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxM0C7zjoAc