Quotes About Literature

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Woman novelists seem to have a reputation for being dowdy.

I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.

Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.

I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read - which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I'm told my books are on required reading lists.

Not exactly what the world was looking for, a musical on 'Don Quixote.' It was required reading in high school.

Say you're an American novelist, published by the largest publishing house in the world. Their goal is to make as much money from you as possible, to have as many people read your book in as many formats as possible. How can you hope to speak intimately to the numbers of people that represent the book sales required?

Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.

It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

Shakespeare's language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that's all.

'Rescue Me' is the first book in a three-book series. Although, like all my series, the books are purposely written so that readers do not have to read them in order.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.

All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.

In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.

I finished 'American Born Chinese' in 2005, so after that, I started actively researching the Boxer Rebellion.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

As a fellow science fiction author, Heinlein largely raised me, and I resent it when some folks lazily dismiss Heinlein as a 'right winger' or even 'fascist.'

It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.

I decided to write a crime novel. That genre was at the height of its popularity in Poland, so I thought it might earn me a bit of cash to go on with my work on 'The Books of Jacob.' I shut myself away for a few months and devoted myself entirely to 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.'

I was shy. Bookish. The kind of 13-year-old girl who, instead of having a boyfriend, would have a crush on a dead, 19th-century author!

We're at economic war with China. It's in all their literature. They're not shy about saying what they're doing.