Quotes About Literature

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.

My favorite writers are all Jews - David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark - well, you get the picture.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do - and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

It was a big thing for me to read black writers. 'Fences,' by August Wilson. James Baldwin's 'Amen Corner.' 'The Fire Next Time.' 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' of course.

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'

Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.

Indonesian writers are so far behind in terms of global exposure compared with the Philippines and Japanese writers.

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

The first story I ever sold was to 'Argosy' magazine, which no longer exists. That issue also contained work by several other more celebrated writers, like Ray Bradbury - so I felt I had at least one toe on the ladder.