Lafcadio Hearn Quotes

I have a huge passion for literature.

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.

Literature has become my life.

My thesis at school was on Wordsworth.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

My first love is literature.

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

English culture is highly literary-based.

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

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

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I read mostly poetry.

The Japanese have different words for love. To them, it's plain weird that we love spaghetti and love our children and love our lovers, all with the same word, when surely the thing being described as love is radically different in each case.

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

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

At my school, Shakespeare wasn't on the syllabus - at least not for me.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

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