Top 100 Quotes About Faulkner
#1. William Faulkner said, "The only story worth telling is that of the human mind in conflict with itself".
Miles Skedsvold
#2. 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
#3. Write drunk (on emotion); edit sober (on rationality and intention).
Faulkner, reimagined by me.
Christina Cooke
#4. [The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented ...
Faulkner in the University, 117
William Faulkner
#6. I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
Carson McCullers
#7. Still here, Faulkner?" Luke sneered.
"Still doing that terrible impression of Draco Malfoy?" I asked.
Robyn Schneider
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Clifton Fadiman
#12. 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
#13. I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
William Faulkner
#14. Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.
Tom T. Hall
#15. 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,
#16. 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.
#17. 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.
Antonya Nelson
#18. 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
#19. Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't.
(William Faulkner)
William Faulkner
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted.
Ralph Ellison
#23. I guess Faulkner never would have written anything like this, huh? Oh, well.
Stephen King
#24. 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
#25. The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.
Gregory Benford
#26. 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
#27. William Faulkner is supposed to have said, "Civilization begins with distillation," but I'd push even further -- beyond just distilled spirits to wine, beer, mead, sake ... all of it. Booze is civilization in a glass.
Adam Rogers
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. - William Faulkner
Tim Powers
#34. 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
#35. Brancusi has his medium: Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich, theirs. Mine happens to be cloth.
Charles James
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner?
Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him?
Jean-Luc Godard
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.
Ray Bradbury
#42. 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.
Laurence Yep
#43. I knew Faulkner very well. He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet. Then you could be a great friend!
Truman Capote
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Interviewer: Some people say they can't understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
Faulkner: Read it four times.
William Faulkner
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
Manuel Puig
#51. William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.
Jennifer Haigh
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
John Darnielle
#55. Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.
Italo Calvino
#56. 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.
Jay Parini
#57. Only a fool trys to outsmart smart people, and anyone that trys to fool fools is himself already one.
~William Faulkner~
William Faulkner
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Here, Faulkner. Behold the girly texts," Toby said, holding out his phone. "And note that I put up with them solely due to our friendship.
Robyn Schneider
#62. Dude, I thought you were gonna stay on your side!" he complained. "That's so sweet," I called. "Who was the big spoon?" "Shut up, Faulkner," Austin grumbled.
Robyn Schneider
#63. Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.
Ron Rash
#64. 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
#65. Memphis can be thought of connected as much to Mississippi and Arkansas as it is to Tennessee, if not more so. William Faulkner once observed that Mississippi extends from a Memphis hotel room to the Gulf of Mexico.
Tav Falco
#66. 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
#67. I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.
Ken Burns
#68. I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!
Candy Crowley
#69. Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
Leslie Fiedler
#70. Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.
Kelli Jae Baeli
#71. Was there anyone before you?" "You might have thought so at the time." "I feel like no one's ever loved me before." "I'm sure they did their best, but you always belonged to me." Monica Faulkner, Jonathan Drazen - Resist
C.D. Reiss
#72. 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
#73. I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
Joyce Carol Oates
#74. I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.
John Larroquette
#75. My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#76. I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora's a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.
William Faulkner
#77. Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
#78. We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
William Faulkner
#79. What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.
William Faulkner
#80. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
#82. If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it ...
William Faulkner
#84. Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner
#85. There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.
William Faulkner
#87. He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
William Faulkner
#88. A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
William Faulkner
#89. That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today
William Faulkner
#90. It's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse.
William Faulkner
#91. There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.
William Faulkner
#92. A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.
William Faulkner
#93. If you got something outside the common run that's got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolks; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Get the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances.
William Faulkner
#95. When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
William Faulkner
#96. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
William Faulkner
#98. The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.
William Faulkner
#99. The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
William Faulkner
