Quotes About Literature

'Catcher In The Rye' was my favorite book, honestly. I read it when I was thirteen, and the book was a bit of a family heirloom because it was passed down from my grandfather to my father to my older brother and then to me.

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism.

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.

England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens... I adopted them passionately.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

I sort of half read Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.' It was assigned in 10th grade, and I just couldn't get into it. About seven years later, I rediscovered Hardy and consumed four of his novels in a row.

Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.

Now that my kids are out of the house, I'm finally able to get to the classics I never read: Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22.' It's endless. They're all in this gigantic pile next to my bed.

I actually thought I wanted to be Thomas Wolfe, but I didn't have the talent. So I thought I could edit Thomas Wolfe.

I studied Wilfred Owen for my English A Level, and that led me to Sassoon and Blunden, Rosenberg and Thomas.

When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK.

I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

I remember the absolute joy I used to get out of writing. The purity of imagining something and then putting it down on paper - it was such a pleasure. I read whatever I could get my hands on, from 'Great Expectations' to 'The Thorn Birds.'

There is a new way of seeing him now. Because of that, there has been a lot of scholarship in Hemingway that is more thorough.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek.