Alaya Dawn Johnson Quotes

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

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

Some things in literature are inexplicable.

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

The first time I read 'Leftovers,' I didn't get it at all.

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.