The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.
One of the great privileges of my life was growing up in a house without books.
At the end of the day, I'm just trying to write a song that I like, that I'm not afraid to turn loose on the world. I do read a lot. I know a lot of people who read more, but I do try to keep a book in my hand most of the time, and I think that informs any kind of output that I'm going to have.
During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature's spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.
'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.
My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it.
Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters.
From what I understand about Shakespeare - which isn't a lot - there was no copyright law when he was writing. He sampled at will, and it wasn't seen as a bad thing.
By the time I was in my teens, I was reading science fiction. I had this maternal uncle who had cartons of books. It's important to read because you have to fill your head with words.
I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.
In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?'
Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.
One novel that I think is an overriding influence in my life is 'All the King's Men,' the most beautiful book written in the U.S.
When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.
If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.
I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
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.
I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
