A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.
All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.
England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.
I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Whatever simplicity I've achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I've read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I've forgotten what the point was.
The first story I ever sold was to 'Argosy' magazine, which no longer exists. That issue also contained work by several other more celebrated writers, like Ray Bradbury - so I felt I had at least one toe on the ladder.
I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.
I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
Only a few things are worth a second reading—rarely are things of such enduring quality that they are read many times and live to inspire a second or third generation.
Once, in an interview with 'V' magazine, I said that I preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway. I think that Hemingway is an amazing writer, but by being related to him, I had it in my head that I had to like him.
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
If you're going to be related to someone it might as well be Dickens.
I grew up in adoration of writers like Hemingway, George Orwell, Anna Akhmatova, and that has always been my idea about the artist - that you have to be a brave and freedom-loving person.
V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.
How wonderful it was to sit on a set with Norman Mailer and get to know him.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
