David Eddings Quotes

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

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.

One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

I'm not a writer who refuses to talk about a book until I've finished.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.

I have read a number of books, starting with novels, that I particularly liked.

I excelled in English while I was at school.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

All literature is gossip.

I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.