Quotes About Literature

It's hard for children's authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her, but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'

I would normally never set out to write a trilogy.

I don't despise 'Don Quixote,' but it is a book I don't... get. I'll have to come back it. Maybe there'll be a gateway story that opens it up for me; that happened for me with 'Paradise Lost' and the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy.

I read 'The Hobbit' but not a single one of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. I had to lie about this pretty much all through high school. I still say it apologetically.

I've been on 'Mastermind' - I tied for first place and then lost on the number of passes. My subject was the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy by Philip Pullman. If I did it again, I'd choose Shakespearian tragedies.

In crime fiction, I cut my teeth on early Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Alan Furst. I always loved the writing of Hemingway and Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy's 'Border Trilogy' has been a huge influence; I think I read those novels four times.

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film.

Longest book was '2666' by Roberto Bolano, and it was an irregular reading experience. I read the first four parts during a cross-country plane trip, reading at slightly slower-than-usual speed but surprised at how accessible the book was compared with 'The Savage Detectives.'

I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.

My mother doesn't need much sleep. At any hour of the night, you'd wake up, and she'd be reading. She'd read five, six books a week. When we went on sailing trips, she'd bring a suitcaseful for the week. Even then, her office would have to send more.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.

I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.

I receive emails from readers that both break my heart and give me a profound sense of connection. Several months ago, I received an email from a teacher who told me that 'Legend' was the first book one of her troubled young students had ever read to the end. He cried when he finished it. Stories like that stay with you forever.

When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left.

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'