British Authors Quotes

I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

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.

British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson, and Cory Doctorow.

Writers in Britain aren't really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

I am indeed a fan of John le Carre's novels.

Some writers you return to again and again, and for me, Nancy Mitford is one of them.

I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.

Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.

Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.

I've recently rediscovered Anthony Trollope. I used to read him back in college, and a friend turned me on to a whole new series of his work, 'The Palliser Series.' It's a series of seven or eight books.

I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'

Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.

'War and Peas' by Michael Foreman, one of the great British children's illustrators. His watercolours are so lovely you could almost eat them, just as members of the target audience have been trying to do for decades.

Britain has had a very honourable tradition of literary sci-fi - H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock - but for whatever reason, they have never really been given the time of day on screen.

I loved Victoria Glendinning's bio of Vita Sackville-West. I also loved Michael Holroyd's immense biography of Lytton Strachey.

I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.