Quotes about William Faulkner

7 Sourced Quotes

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.

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 can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.

Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine.

Hunter S. Thompson

I agree with William Faulkner, who once said that a writer's obituary should read, 'He wrote books, then he died.'.

John Gregory Dunne

Well, Nabokov is definitely my favorite author, though I feel strange calling him an "influence," since I can't trace the ways in which his writing may or may not have seeped into my own. But I also love William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kenneth Patchen, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mark Helprin (who wrote a beautiful book called Winter's Tale), and Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite book of all time is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

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—and the best journalists have always known this.

Hunter S. Thompson