David Sedaris Quotes

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

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.

I'd love to meet Flannery O'Connor. I think I'd be content to hear her speak on any subject. What forces shaped her. What nebula of books and stories were whirling together inside her at the time of her death.

I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

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

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

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.

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.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

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.

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

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

I'm not really a mass market writer.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

I really look up to writers who are able to write compressed, single-scene stories, where everything happens in a kitchen. But I just can't think that way. For me it would be impossible to write a story where I didn't know what someone's parents did and what their grandparents did and who they used to date.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

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

I grew up reading a lot of these super weird, genre-bending Southern gothic writers.

Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.