Phil Klay Quotes

When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives. The other attractive thing about 'As I Lay Dying' was the way it gave rich voices to the poor.

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

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.

I read 'Sabella or The Blood Stone' by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith's writing. She's just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.

Macbeth was the first play I ever read.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

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

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

'The Merchant of Venice' is a straightforward, clear story, while 'The Winter's Tale,' as a general rule, is hard to present because there is so much plot.

The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can't pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can't make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.