Anton Chekhov Quotes

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

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.

'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.

Fortunately age does not affect literature. After a man is dead, he may continue in the business and often rank higher than his living competitors.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

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.

I think every writer wants future generations to read what he has written.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

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

'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

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

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

Shakespeare was of us, Milton was of us, Burns, Shelley, were with us. They watch from their graves!

This sounds corny, but I once told a kid when I was in a the library conference, the best - not the best, what I really hope for is that someday 20, 30 years from now, some kid, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, in Des Moines will be going through the stacks, if they have stacks anymore - they probably won't - and find a book of mine and get something from it.

He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains. Even when the original author of some healthy and useful truth is forgotten, the truth survives, transplanted to works more calculated to purify it from error, and perpetuate it to our benefit.

Shakespeare has done far more for the world than the Bible.