Rodney Crowell Quotes

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

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.

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

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

So I grew up in a very book-friendly environment and my education as a writer was reading. I think that's the best education. Reading, and taking from the people I admired.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

The kind of stuff I usually read is a bit more on the literary side, like books that I think are influential in the sense that they're doing pulpy subject matter in a refined way. Like 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy; I loved that book.

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

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

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 can always tell when I'm about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I'm beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.

I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

Like many writers, I'm usually more interested in reading about authors than their actual works. We're more curious to know how they were written than what they are like to read.

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

As a teenager, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. And in my 20s, I read a lot of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, so I wrote like those guys. But, little by little, you develop your own style.

Invariably it turns out to be who you've been reading in the last couple of weeks, and two hours or two days [on favourite authors

Maybe because I began as a writer, I have a good ear for dialogue, and maybe being an English major - and that I also read a lot as a kid - if I hear somebody say something that I think's funny, or I find a situation or story, I'll try to work that into the movie.

I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.