Chantal Akerman Quotes

Proust is a huge author for me.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

I'd like to read all of Proust.

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

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

I am not a Hemingway aficionado.

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.

I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.

I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.

When I was a kid, I loved 'Little Women.'

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

'As I Lay Dying,' I reread that often. That's the first work of Faulkner's that I read that so amazed me and that I responded to emotionally and viscerally. I admired it so much, and I think that's why I keep rereading it.

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

One of my favourite books when I was young was 'Wuthering Heights.'