Pamela Sargent Quotes

'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.

Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

I'm sure I wouldn't have been asked to judge the Man Booker if it weren't for 'Downton.'

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

The original version of 'The White Mountains' was probably just about worth publishing.

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

What many people don't know about 'Peter Pan' is that it's a very violent book and Hook is one of the most finely observed villains ever.

I picked up my college copy of 'The Great Gatsby' in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I'd underlined. The answer was basically: everything.