Tony D'Souza Quotes

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

We take literature too seriously.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

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

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

Literature is news that stays news.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

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

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.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

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

My two goals are to read everything Edith Wharton has ever written and to have an art collection.

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.