Kate Adie Quotes

I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.

One good thing about leaving daily journalism was that I was no longer obliged to read all the book prize short lists.

I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them.

Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there.

I'm always interested in contemporary fiction.

I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'

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.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

My favorite short stories are by Alice Munro, especially her collections 'Carried Away' and 'Runaway.'

Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.

I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

For about as long as I've been writing fiction, I've kept a record of the books I've read.

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it