Literary Tastes Quotes

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

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

It would probably surprise people to know that I'm interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.

It's fun for me to be with someone who loves reading as much as I do, because he'll give me things to read that I wouldn't normally seek out, and I think vice versa.

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre - and the dusty copy of 'The Thorn Birds' on my parents' bookshelf.

I really like looking at other people's book collections when I'm at someone's house. I think it is an amazing cross section of a person's brain and lifestyle. I think everyone should photograph their book spines and make a website. Seriously.

People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good.

What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul.

I've got to stop being such a snob about leather-bound books, he reminded himself. E-books do have their moments.

A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if, to the character of a collector, he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented.

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.

I think printed fiction is what women read.

I'm just writing what I know. I've never been much of a reader of fantasy, and I think you write what you, personally, enjoy reading.

I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.

Pity the man who has a favorite restaurant, but not a favorite author.

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

I read very little contemporary anything.

She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.

A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.

I do not travel. I am not much of an extrovert, and I'm not much interested in extroverted objects. I do not care for the 'ideas' of novelists. Novels are wonderful, of course, but I prefer newspapers.

Invariably it turns out to be who you've been reading in the last couple of weeks, and two hours or two days [on favourite authors

I wasn't interested in the kinds of books that I thought I should be reading.

As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.