Top 105 Faulkner Quotes & Sayings

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.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

Id love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

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.

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner.

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.

I never got too specialized but did like the Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

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.

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.

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.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'd have liked to have been another Faulkner, of course.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore.

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 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.

Brancusi has his medium: Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich, theirs. Mine happens to be cloth.

I wrote a paper [in school] on [William] Faulkner and no one could tell what the sentences meant.

Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's.

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

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

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.

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.

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

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

'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.

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.

It's really hard to write a screenplay, it's nauseating. All those great writers that tried to write screenplays, they couldn't do it, most of them - John Faulkner, whoever, Aldous Huxley.

When I was younger, people were inventing a new way of writing - James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. And I thought we had to find a structure for cinema. I fought for a radical cinema, and I continued all my life.

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.

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'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.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

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.

I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.

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.