Faulkner quotes:

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Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner. -- Tom T. Hall
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep. -- Clifton Fadiman
I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon. -- John Larroquette
Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place. -- Ron Rash
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible. -- Leslie Fiedler
Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences. -- Italo Calvino
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all. -- Manuel Puig
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway. -- Joyce Carol Oates
My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible. -- John Darnielle
I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick! -- Candy Crowley
I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now. -- Ken Burns
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. -- John Grisham
When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner. -- Frances Mayes
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. -- Leslie Fiedler
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. -- Joyce Carol Oates
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. -- Leslie Fiedler
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. -- John Updike
So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter. -- Donna Tartt
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. -- Shelby Foote
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. -- Charlie Trotter
I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed. -- Barry Hannah
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework. -- E. L. Doctorow
Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore. -- Truman Capote
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? -- Ernest Hemingway
I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past." -- John Edgar Wideman
Brancusi has his medium: Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich, theirs. Mine happens to be cloth. -- Charles James
I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner. -- Carson McCullers
I wrote a paper [in school] on [William] Faulkner and no one could tell what the sentences meant. -- Elizabeth Crook
Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan. -- Ray Bradbury
Id love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick! -- Candy Crowley
Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's. -- Milan Kundera
I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it. -- Karen Joy Fowler
A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own. -- Alfred Kazin
Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism... -- Hunter S. Thompson
If you're going to be a narcissistic schmuck, kid, don't bother studying Faulkner. Go straight to Brett Easton Ellis. He's the role model you need. -- Arinn Dembo
The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. -- Northrop Frye
I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that. -- Billy Bob Thornton
The last thing we wanted was a copycat. When we saw [Richie Faulkner] play, we thought, "We don't have to tell this guy anything. He's got it." -- Rob Halford
Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque. -- George Saunders
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college. -- Edward Abbey
As the style of Faulkner grew out of his rage--out of the impotence of his rage--the style of Hemingway grew out of the depth andnuance of his disenchantment. -- Wright Morris
The only advice we gave Richie Faulkner was we wanted Richie to be his own guy. You have to let your musicians in your band be who they are. -- Rob Halford
It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be. -- Joyce Carol Oates
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. -- Robert Morgan
We can't slow up because of our love for democracy and our love for America. Someone should tell Faulkner that the vast majority of the people on this globe are colored. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again. -- Alice McDermott
I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't. -- Ernest Hemingway
Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative. -- Barry Lopez
I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it. -- Chaim Potok
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. -- Ernest Hemingway
The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields. -- Alexandra Adornetto
Richie Faulkner is very respectful to the songs that he plays from when [founding member] K.K. [Downing] was in the band. He plays them incredibly. And he's got his own nuances and his own techniques that he puts in - as he should. -- Rob Halford
If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal. -- Dave Barry
Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book. -- Ron Rash
It was a period when live TV was just starting and getting popular and they took it seriously too. Not so much like TV now. They did [Ernst] Hemingway and [William] Faulkner - and they're all wonderful artists and it just was very creative at that time. -- Gena Rowlands
I made an executive decision in college when I learned how behind I was in the world of books, films, and music because of my rural upbringing. I really reduced the amount of time that sports took up in my life.I still have some Faulkner to get through. -- Nick Offerman
As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy. -- George R. R. Martin
When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. -- Walter Kirn
I wanted to make comics that get at feelings that connect to the deepest moments of our lives, reading Tolstoy, Flaubert, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Carver to help gain the confidence to figure it out. I knew, however, the most doomed approach would be to simply create stories that felt 'literary.' -- Chris Ware

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