Andrew Motion Quotes

I have a hard time finding something that I really enjoy reading, but I read 'The Great Gatsby' every summer.

The first time I remember really being excited about a book was 'The Count of Monte Cristo.'

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Some things in literature are inexplicable.

I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back.

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

It's very important to understand that the 'Talk' piece was not an excerpt, it was an adaptation, which means I compressed different parts of the book and made a new piece.

I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

I don't like sequels at all. If the movie's good the first time, why bother?

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Maybe Oliver Stone doesn't lend himself well to remakes or sequels, because he does them so well the first time.

I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement.

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.