Quotes About Literature

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from 'hurry sickness.' Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

I have passed English medical examinations in Hong Kong... In my youth, I experienced overseas studies. The languages of the West, its literature, its political science, its customs, its mathematics, its geography, its physics and chemistry - all these I have had the chance to study.

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

Literature - Eastern and Western - abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'

I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.

Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.

'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.

Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.

It's always tricky, meeting an author you've admired.

I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.

I tried for years to get an agent because I was told you needed an agent. The agent-hunting process was grim indeed.

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.