Wesley Clark Quotes

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

I'm an enormous fan of American literature, and especially the great novels of Larry McMurtry, 'Lonesome Dove,' Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard.

I'm a big Hemingway and Salinger fan.

I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.

I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.

I never got too specialized but did like the Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.

I used to read a lot of Steinbeck, and I admired Roger Miller and Bob Dylan.

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

I love it when people ask who my influences are... or what my favorite part of my last book was... or the last great book I read.

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.

Fitzgerald was a modernist.

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.

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at.

By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.