author's influence Quotes

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me.

After 'A Perfect Storm' came out, I heard from a young reader, who had suffered a similar background as 'Arizona,' that I had helped her to find peace. That was the most amazing thing in the world to me.

I'm not from the movie world. I'm from the book world.

For me, everyone I write of is real. I have little true say in what they want, what they do or end up as (or in). Their acts appall, enchant, disgust or astound me. Their ends fill me with retributive glee, or break my heart. I can only take credit (if I can even take credit for that) in reporting the scenario. This is not a disclaimer. Just a fact.

From my point of view, 'Stranger in a Strange Land' isn't just a science fiction masterpiece; it also happens to be one of my favorite books ever.

My favourite emails are along the lines of, 'My 14-year-old doesn't read much, but I gave him your book and he finished it in two days.' This has been the most rewarding experience.

people in general are totally unable to detach the personality of a writer from the products of his thinking.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.

Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea.

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction.

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

It's always extremely interesting to speak at colleges. My books are taught in many colleges in America and are part of the educational system, so it's really important to me. I don't believe in so many things in life, but something I believe in is education.

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.

The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.

Judaism is in all my books.

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because of some Asshole's thoughts who wrote the introduction.

As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.

Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.

As will so often be the case when a men has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer, - in using which, either for defence or attack, a man can hardly measure the strength of the blows he gives.