literary environment Quotes

My childhood was spent in my local library in a San Diego suburb. It's where I became a writer - by 1st becoming a reader!

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

It's not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing.

If a man’s house is full of medicine bottles, we infer the man is an invalid. But if his house is full of books, we conclude he is intelligent.

I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.

I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.

My dad is a retired Shakespeare professor, my mother a retired classicist. Suffice to say I grew up in a house full of books, where reading was encouraged if not required.