Quotes About Influential authors

If Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake had a literary love child, he would be Timothy Hallinan.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

I've never got on very well with Jane Austen.

Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.

He had shown me letters he had received not only from Kafka but from Jakob Wassermann, Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Martin Buber.

Any writer takes inspiration from what they read and watch, and over their career works on forming their own voice. I think it was probably Stephen King who made me want to become a writer.

Daphne Du Maurier and Anya Seton, all of Mary Stewart's early books, along with Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney

Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet.

When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.

Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, and Amelia B. Edwards (yes, the Egyptologist who gave her first name to Amelia Peabody) all contributed to the craze. Henry James' magnificent The Turn of the Screw is one of the best:

Lampedusa, Bassani y Cassola. Por mi parte, hoy

Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, P.D. James, Ernest Tidyman, John Le Carré, Norman Mailer, Penelope Fitzgerald and Colin Dexter all transported

I think Judy Blume, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz are the three authors responsible for my being where I am today. I owe them a lot.

I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.

Among non-fiction authors I like Richard Bach, Nichiren Daishonin, Burton Watson, Deepak Chopra and MJ Akbar.

Like so many others, I came to romance during the golden age of it - Judith McNaught, Julie Garwood, Johanna Lindsey and Jude Deveraux were at the height of their historical domination. Without those women, I wouldn't be a romance novelist.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

A lot of dead writers feed my mind with their ever-present whisperings.

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

Tom Wolfe was in town and I invited him over to the house to meet Hunter. The two of them were great fans of each other, Hell's Angels and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test were almost companion books, yet these men had never met.

I definitely look up to Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and J.K. Rowling.