Quotes About Faulkner

My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.

Oh, he's magic. Faulkner has opened passages in my brain. You do things you'd never expect.

Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives. The other attractive thing about 'As I Lay Dying' was the way it gave rich voices to the poor.

What is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. Furtive, implacable and tricky, it inspirits both the observer and the scene observed, artifacts, manners and atmosphere and it speaks even when no one wills to listen.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature - I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

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.

The praise Greene most valued, however, came not in a review: Faulkner himself wrote in a letter to his British publisher, the contents of which were soon passed on, 'I have also read Mr Greene's THE END OF THE AFFAIR; not one of yours, but for me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody's language.'9

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.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson.

'As I Lay Dying,' I reread that often. That's the first work of Faulkner's that I read that so amazed me and that I responded to emotionally and viscerally. I admired it so much, and I think that's why I keep rereading it.

I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.

Totalitarians always want to kill culture. But imagine life without football, Faulkner, or Bob Dylan. It's not life.

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.

On a daily basis I'm covering things that are leaking out of the White House and leaking out what should be closed-door meetings on the Hill. That is not integrity.

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.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

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.

Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity, and modern man's dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials.

I'd been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.

Faulkner describes in Light in August as "a prone and somnolent yellow cat

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.