Quotes About Literature

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

I didn't really sign up to be a celebrity, I only signed up to be a writer.

My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.

In a time of crisis, there is rational tendency to turn to the writer.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.

There are Behan experts in international universities, but we seem to have forgotten him here in Ireland. He was an extraordinarily gifted writer. His poetry alone is outstanding.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

I read 'The Last Wish' and really loved it. But I never would have called myself a fantasy writer before this. I've done some comic book shows, I've done a lot of drama. So when I read the book I loved it but never thought I should adapt it personally.

Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself - of poems and stories and essays - delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

I've basically worked as a journalist and a writer.

Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.

I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.