David Almond Quotes

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

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

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.

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.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see the - any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.

Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.

Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next 'Gone With the Wind.'

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.

I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

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

The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

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

Flannery O'Connor is my creative hero. I think she's the greatest American writer. Her book, 'Mystery and Manners,' is my creative bible.

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.

Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.

I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.

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

Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.

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.