Faulkner loved to give advice after his Nobel Prize win that he himself didn’t follow in his early years. He cared quite a bit actually about developing his style, as evidenced by how poorly he imitated Joyce in his first novel. It was just already ingrained in by the time he did those interviews.

It wasn’t until his fourth novel “The Sound and The Fury” that he had become a master of prose. Sure he wrote pretty sentences in “Flags in the Dust” but he had to stop the whole narrative to do so.