Unidentified participant: Sir, when you are reading for your own pleasure, which authors do you consistently return to?
William Faulkner: The ones I came to love when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. Moby-Dick, the Old Testament, Shakespeare, a lot of Conrad, Dickens. I read Don Quixote every year.
Tag: influences
Barthelme’s Influences
INTERVIEWER
Your own influences—whom would you like to cite as your spiritual ancestors?
BARTHELME
They come in assorted pairs. Perelman and Hemingway. Kierkegaard and Sabatini. Kafka and Kleist. Kleist was clearly one of Kafka’s fathers. Rabelais and Zane Grey. The Dostoyevsky of Notes from Underground. A dozen Englishmen. The surrealists, both painters and poets. A great many film people, Buñuel in particular. It’s always a stew, isn’t it? Errol Flynn ought to be in there somewhere, and so should Big Sid Catlett, the drummer.
“I Learn as Much from Painters About How to Write as from Writers” — Hemingway on His Literary Forebears
Ernest Hemingway describes his influences in his 1958 interview with George Plimpton at The Paris Review—
INTERVIEWER
Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you have learned the most from?
HEMINGWAY
Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.
Biblioklept 