David Lipsky Quotes

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

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

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.

I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

To me, O'Hara is the real Fitzgerald.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

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.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.