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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Butch Trucks

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

Candy Crowley

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 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

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

Clifton Fadiman

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

Dan Brown

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

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

David Milch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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