Literary Brilliance Quotes

I have always felt a special affinity with V. S. Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his work is unified by a great generosity of spirit.

George Saunders's 'Lincoln in the Bardo' is a hands-down masterpiece - the subject of Abraham Lincoln and the genius of this author is a perfect union.

The glory of a next Augustan age A golden age of poetry and power Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.

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

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

There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most widely read author in the world. He was lionized everywhere, translated into every language. For the first four decades of the 20th century, his novellas and biographies were devoured by rich and poor, young and old, well read or less so.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.

When I read 'The Master', I felt that I had read a true classic. It's so rare nowadays that you have that feeling: it was a privilege to read it.

I own a copy of the original 'Talking Heads' by Alan Bennett, which I purchased many years ago shortly after they were first broadcast. It's been lovingly well-thumbed over the years. They are magnificent. A masterpiece.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.

You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

I can't rave enough about Eloisa James. I'm simply in awe of her talent.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Knut Hamsun's writing is magical. His sentences are glowing; he could write about anything and make it alive. Of contemporary writers, Thure Erik Lund is my definite favorite.

When I finished 'True History of the Kelly Gang,' I realised that Faulkner had not lost his power over me.

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

The really good stuff- the 'Hamiltons' - comes out after decades of writing and being committed.