INTERVIEWER
Do you read your contemporaries?
FAULKNER
No, the books I read are the ones I
knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old
friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don
Quixote—I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert,
Balzac—he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through
twenty books—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally
and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and
Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so often that I don't
always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or
about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.
