It would, in my opinion, be absolutely by the trueness that they are telling, and I don’t mean the sticking to fact because facts and truth don’t really have much to do with each other. It’s to stick to the fundamental truth of man’s struggle within the human dilemma. He can be a bad writer, he can — I mean by that he could be a bad punctuator grammarian — but he’s still a first-rate writer if the people that he’s portraying follow the universal patterns of man’s behavior inside the human condition.
Conversations with William Faulkner
edited by M. Thomas Inge