Jay Parini Quotes

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.

I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

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

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.

When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.

I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.

The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Lincoln is a genius of language and a brilliant writer who deserves to be seen as part of the canon of great writers in American literature.

I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

In 20th-century poetry, Robert Graves is to love what Philip Larkin is to mortality.

Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).