Quotes About Literature

William Kittredge's 'Hole in the Sky' is one of my favorite books. Ian Frazier's 'Family' I adore.

I'd love Shakey Bill to tell me a story - I mean, William Shakespeare, he could squeak a nib couldn't he?

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

I love e-books. I can carry the complete works of William Shakespeare around with me all the time. Just think about that. Whether I'm on an airplane or wherever. Being able to have a library in your back pocket basically is something I support.

Film rights were in the offing for 'The Onion Field,' eventually made into a movie in 1979; 'The New Centurions' became a 1972 film starring George C. Scott, while 'The Blue Knight' starred William Holden in a 1973 mini-series version.

I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I'm not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.

I knew William Burroughs really well, and I was always star struck being around him. I adored him.

J. G. Ballard is just an example of the writers I like. Philip K. Dick is obviously one of them. I'm a big fan of William Gibson as well. He started cyberpunk with 'Neuromancer.' I've come to know him a little bit over Twitter, of all places, and I was always a huge fan of his. It's very cool to know he even knows I exist.

They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.

When I was 19, I took a train from Houston to New York, and I had in my lap the collected works of William Shakespeare. The play I read on that journey was 'Titus Andronicus.'

I never got too specialized but did like the Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

I consider William Gay one of the great writers that no one has ever heard of.

I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.

I love Tennessee Williams pieces; they are so poetic and I love period pieces.

I was a lusty kid who loved Tennessee Williams.

I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay.

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.