Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.

Murakami's ability to deconstruct and his aesthetic and conceptual freedom have been totally inspiring for me.

I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.

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.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

I love David Lynch movies, and I like Haruki Murakami books.

Anything by D. H. Lawrence or Jean Genet - 'Zen Mind,' 'Beginner's Mind' is my daily go to for non-fiction.

I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower.

One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I'm deeply inspired by all of his work - I rip him off constantly.

There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

As 'Possession' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges.

I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.

I'd have liked to have been another Faulkner, of course.

I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called 'Centuria,' which contains 100 stories, each of them about a page long. They're somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.