William Safire Quotes

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

I think I'm much more comfortable talking about other books than my own!

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.

I never read articles about my books.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

You have not done well to publish your books of Rhetoric; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to all?

It's a novel experience to have one of my books read by a reading group.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights into the literary world. Reading about the love letters novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife Vera blew my mind. Fascinating.

All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept.

When we read about reading, we get to share an experience that is usually kept private. Incisive descriptions of reading help us to understand what is going on when our eyes move across words on the page.

There are few things that are more revealing about someone than the way that they talk about a piece of literature or a play. You very quickly come to have a much deeper understanding of someone than you would if you just mingled together in a pub saying, 'All right, how are you?'

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

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see the - any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'

When I read interviews with people like Kevin Barry or Colin Barrett, who I hugely admire, they don't really seem to come up against the question of likeability even though their characters, in some instances, are really horrible.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.