Sarah Hall Quotes

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

What you do with it and things like that, but I basically chose this after I read it because I thought it was different and funny and unique and dark - things that I like to do.

'True Blood' differs from 'Six Feet Under' in that there are way more characters and plot-lines, but fundamentally it's still about the characters and their emotions.

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

Never open a book with weather. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.

Anything I've ever read by John Irving has been really well written.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

Accents can be a great tool to tell a story - but if you do it wrong, it pulls you right out of the movie.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

I'm often drawn in by a description of a woman thinking something familiar that's never been articulated before, as in Diane Cook's 'Somebody's Baby' or Nina Berberova's 'The Tattered Cloak.'

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.