Quotes About Influential authors

Missoula has a culture uniquely its own, however, thanks to the fusion of its gritty frontier heritage with the university's myriad impacts. UM has nationally distinguished programs in biology and ecology and is perhaps even more renowned for its literary bona fides. The faculty of the university's Creative Writing Program, founded in 1920, has included such influential authors as Richard Hugo, James Crumley, and William Kittredge.

INDISPENSABLE BOOKS Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe.

I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.

Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.

Obviamente me siento mucho más cerca de John Berger o de Calvino que de García Márquez.

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

The book probably owes a little to The Tooth and the Nail, by Bill S. Ballinger, a fine writer who's pretty much forgotten these

[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum.

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s.

William Kittredge's 'Hole in the Sky' is one of my favorite books. Ian Frazier's 'Family' I adore.

John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.

J. G. Ballard is just an example of the writers I like. Philip K. Dick is obviously one of them. I'm a big fan of William Gibson as well. He started cyberpunk with 'Neuromancer.' I've come to know him a little bit over Twitter, of all places, and I was always a huge fan of his. It's very cool to know he even knows I exist.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.

Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.

England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens... I adopted them passionately.