Benmont Tench Quotes

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

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.

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

I'm never going to be Tolstoy.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.