Words matter. These are the best Faulkner Quotes from famous people such as Clifton Fadiman, John Grisham, Dan Brown, David Milch, Jesmyn Ward, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
I can’t change overnight into a serious literary author. You can’t compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
I’m not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.
Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.
Faulkner’s characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Of course, I’m of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison’s early books a lot. But she’s really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.
I don’t want to turn 50 and say, ‘Gosh, I wish I’d lived in that part of the world for a time. I wish I’d read that book by Faulkner.’ I want time to delve back into Thoreau and Kafka.
Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.
In crime fiction, I cut my teeth on early Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Alan Furst. I always loved the writing of Hemingway and Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy’ has been a huge influence; I think I read those novels four times.
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
Oh, he’s magic. Faulkner has opened passages in my brain. You do things you’d never expect.
Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.
Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.
In 1966, I attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1970. I received my doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I wrote my dissertation on William Faulkner’s early novels.
I’d love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That’s how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought ‘The Fable’ was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked ‘Tender Is the Night,’ an experimental novel.
John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
I subscribe to William Faulkner’s’ view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.
I like the beauty of Faulkner’s poetry. But I don’t like his themes, not at all.
My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who’ve become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master’s thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn’t find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn’t read Faulkner.
I have written about some truly great writers – John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
