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 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.

Agnes Varda

Life Younger Young

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

Home Write Wind

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

Worries Water UN

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

Art Wrote Writers

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

Work Travel Life

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

Butch Trucks

Age You Things

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

Candy Crowley

Love William Will

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

Time Art World

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.

Claire Messud

Work Us Two

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

Clifton Fadiman

Your You Than

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

Dan Brown

Yin William Will

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.

David Milch

Work War History

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

David Milch

Wrote Us T

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.

David Milch

Great Us UN

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

Men Writer Write

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

Work Time Art

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

Art Age Wolf

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

Science Knowledge Writing

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

Love Great Good

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

Famous Voice Us

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

Gregory Benford

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.

Harry Belafonte

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

Henry Paulson

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

Italo Calvino

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

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

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.

Jesmyn Ward

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.

Jesmyn Ward

'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.

Jesmyn Ward

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.

Jesmyn Ward

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

John Darnielle

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

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

John Larroquette

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

After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.

Josh Malerman

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

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

Ken Burns

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

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

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

Leslie Fiedler

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

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

Louise Erdrich

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

Manuel Puig

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mat Kearney

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.

Nick Petrie

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.

Peter Carey