Quotes About Literature

My favorite novel ever is Abraham Verghese's 'Cutting for Stone.' It takes you so many places. I stayed up to 4 in the morning to finish it.

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that's a great loss.

Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.

Librarians have always stood up for writers and readers in every kind of community across this country.

I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.

So the books have a greater appeal to a British audience, but that hasn't stopped them making best-seller lists in places like Brazil, Japan and at least a dozen other countries.

I never stopped reading.

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.

I don't think about being famous, really. Being an author, I don't generally get stopped as I walk down the street. It's not like being a movie star.

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.

I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.

I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.

I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores.

I have three kids who like Harry Potter so I was sort of aware of it. You can't really move from it: it's on buses, in stores, it's everywhere. One of my kids has read the books; the other two are too small but they like the movies.

Space opera was the sort of story on which I grew up. When I was younger, I read heavily in pulp magazines. They were readily available in the stores.

Of course I always like going to bookstores, but at stores, you're mostly meeting kids who are already into reading.

Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress.

I feel very privileged to have reached so many kids because a life without stories, without the power of books, would be a very grey world, it's good to add colour.

I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

I like to read Bengali novels and short stories. I am not that fond of reading English books, as I don't have a connect with it.