George Edward Woodberry Quotes

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

English culture is highly literary-based.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Read the writers whose work is still around and has survived the winds of fashion and the attacks of the ignorant and the bigoted - read everything you can get your hands on.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

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.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

Literature is news that stays news.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.