Literary Challenge Quotes

There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That's what I intend to do and what I'm longing for.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

I'm not a poet. So the writing process is a difficult one for me.

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

I have translated Bengali poets such as Subhash Mukhopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay before. These were published by Hindi and Urdu magazines. But to take on Tagore's work is no easy task.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.

I don't really have a bucket list, but if I did, one entry would be to dust off my college Russian and spend a big chunk of a year reading, or trying to read, 'War and Peace' as it was meant to be read, in Russian, with all that rumbly rocks-on-rocks poetry inherent to the language.

My writing just kind of exists out there in the air-it's all sort of intended as spoken, or sung, word. So, to commit them to the page...that way was kind of intimidating to me, yet intriguing, to try to reflect the rhythms and connotations and emotions that you can deliver, speaking-wise, on a page.

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.

The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.

A writer should always feel like he's in over his head

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?'