Frank McCourt Quotes

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

For me, it's all about The Dubliners by James Joyce. I love The Dead.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

I love Martin Amis.

I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book.