Quotes About Literature

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

'To Kill a Mockingbird' wasn't about me.

I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.

I have never read 'To Kill A Mockingbird.'

I don't read books. I read 'On the Road' in high school, and that was awesome, so I guess that's my favorite book. 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' even though I didn't read it, that's the greatest story. SparkNotes came in when I was in high school, and that was the greatest invention.

I look back at my childhood, and the films that I remember the most are things like 'Mary Poppins,' 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

Before my book, 'California,' came out, I had modest hopes for it. Or, let's put it this way - I had the same hopes that every literary fiction writer in America has: I wanted the novel to be well-received, critically. As for sales? I didn't want it to disappoint, but I didn't expect it to be a best-seller, either.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters.

Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.'

We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends.

I read a lot of true-crime books, but sometimes they can put you in a bad mood.

I'm into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment - like music, literature, and art.

I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of whom I really fell in love with.

In Shakespeare, the moral balances are very fine.

Books follow morals, and not morals books.

I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.