Quotes About Literature

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.

I read a lot and some of the things I read are blaxploitation books, things by Donald Goines or Iceberg Slim. The books are filled with a lot of street knowledge; they really recall an era.

Realistically, the chance of any book becoming a film is slim.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

I was a slow and lazy reader as a kid. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was the only non-school book I would read, over and over, between television, records and radio, until I picked up my aunt's copy of 'In Cold Blood' and she didn't ask for it back.

I'm quite a slow reader. It can take me quite a while to get though a book.

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.

Many of the books I loved as a kid, that even my mother read as a child, are very slow going. Today's children are not as patient. The best example of this is 'The Secret Garden,' which I adored as a child.

The daily quota I've set for myself is 500 words or approximately a page and a half double-spaced. Which isn't much, except that I'm extremely slow, extremely meticulous. 'Le mot juste' haunts me. On a good day, I will finally secrete the 500th word at about 5 o'clock, and I'll reward myself by going to Housing Works Bookstore to read.

I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a relatively slow reader.

I'm a painfully slow reader. And to this day, I mean, I love reading, and I'm very careful - very selective about what I read because I don't read very fast and, therefore, not a great deal.

I am a serious reader, and I read slowly.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

'Madame Bovary' advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one.

Few things are more painful than being a successful writer born in a small country with an impenetrable language.

I meet people, and we can get past small talk pretty quickly if they've read my books. It's a great shortcut.

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English.

I am very conscious that, from the time of 'The God of Small Things' was published 10 years ago, we are in a different world... which needs to be written about differently, and I really very much want to do that.

'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'

I seem to be drawn to these smaller forms, and I seem to be drawn to things that can be written and also read in one sitting.

I read hugely as a child, but I slowed up when the print got smaller. I am a very slow reader. I don't know why. Maybe it is like some people chewing their food for ages and some wolfing it down.