Literary Preferences Quotes

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

Southern lawyers don't read novels much.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn.'

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.

Read much, but not too many books.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

I'm a poetry-skipper myself. I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country - make it any other two persons. This doesn't mean that I hate poetry. I don't feel that strongly about it. It only means that those who wish to communicate with me by means of the written word must do so in prose.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

Whenever I sign books, I get this line over and over again from men: "I don't read fiction, but my wife does. Would you sign the book to her?" What are those men doing there? And where are their wives?

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I love Chris Crutcher, Sara Zarr, Lois Lowry, Elizabeth Scott, Madeleine L'Engle, Gordon Korman, Michelle Magorian, Heather Bouwman.

I read a couple of books a week. About 80 percent of what I read is contemporary literature for adults. The other 20 percent is made up of non-fiction and children's books.

I was a kid who loved to read. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn't have one favorite book. I had lots of favorite books: 'The Borrowers' by Mary Norton, 'Paddington' by Michael Bond, 'A Little Princess' by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 'Stuart Little' by EB White, 'A Cricket in Times Square,' all the Beverly Cleary books.

I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

We ought to regard books as we do sweetmeats, not wholly to aim at the pleasantest, but chiefly to respect the wholesomest; not forbidding either, but approving the latter most.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.