Quotes About Literature

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.

My goal is to be surrounded by books.

Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep.

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the 'Iliad', but they survive only as fragments.

A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work.

I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Family.'

I have favorite authors from a lifetime of reading, so there are some I'll automatically read every time they have a new novel. Included in them: Robert Goddard, Jeffery Deaver, Sophie Kinsella, Katherine Neville, Greg Isle, Laurie King, Lee Child, Lisa Tucker, Susan Howatch, Paul Auster. Barry Eisler, David Hewson, Tracy Chevalier.

I'm a huge fan of Alice Hoffman, Fred Chappell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I first met Susan Sontag in spring 1976 when she was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help type her correspondence. I had been recommended by the editors of 'The New York Review of Books,' where I'd worked as an editorial assistant.

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.

The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.

I'm a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.

Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.

Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.

I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.