Paul Di Filippo Quotes

Stephen King, by far, is the standard-bearer. I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish. I read his book 'On Writing' before I read pretty much any of his fiction.

Having a movie that lasts and makes your image imprinted into the history of cinema, it's very positive.

Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.

People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.

Writers want to be reread. They want to think that their words don't just flash by but deserve some reflection.

Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.

It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

I take his [Theodore Geisel] legacy very, very seriously. I know others may disagree because he's made such an impact on so many people that response to work becomes very personal, so people will have different points of view. But, at the core of this, I take the protection and the extension of his legacy very, very seriously. It's a very important part of my life.

I have never witnessed poverty like I did in Haiti. The kind that is so deep and wide-reaching that it feels impossible to make a difference. But I found that lives can and are being changed. It may take a lot of work and time but Concern has, and continues to make, serious progress because they stayed long after the world moved on.

Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

On the day long after childhood when I suddenly heard of his death, the sky grew dark above my head. I was walking on a Southern highway, and a friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, stopped and said, "Have you heard that Charles Dickens is dead?" It was as if I had been robbed of one of my dearest friends.

While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his best.

I won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our ways of thinking and feeling-about ourselves, those we love, those we hate, those we realize are hopelessly 'other' to us-are more shaped by Shakespeare than they are by the experience of our own lives.

Think beyond your lifetime if you want to accomplish something truly worthwhile.

Truthfully, I guess I would like to be remembered as a great writer and a kind person. I wouldn't mind if an expensive bag were named after me, like Jane Birkin.

The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.

Lasting change can occur only when it takes in the spirit of the mind.

Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.