Quotes About Literature

I make no claim to be an authority on writing or illustrating for children.

We don't have a superhero culture. Comic books and superheroes are part of American culture. We have 'Amar Chitrakatha,' etc.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

I didn't know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.

In the world of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar.

If a reader likes a particular author, they keep reading all his books, and if the supply is not kept up, then the reader shifts his loyalties.

Buying new books supports the writer by providing both a royalty and an audience; a writer whose book sells well has a better chance of selling another.

I suppose people might consider me a 'loose' reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose.

Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them.

It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.

I don't think I found my voice until I reached New York. I suppose it's possible I would have had some kind of different literary career if I had not discovered New York.

I suppose books are my real passion in life.

I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.

Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75.

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.