Hale Appleman Quotes

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.

You didn't grow up in the shadow of John Steinbeck. He put you on his shoulders and gave you all the light you wanted.

In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me.

My mum was never too keen on TV, so we kids all went to the library and got books out. Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him.

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.

He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

I think once you sort of cross over and you realize what books can be - and if they mean something to you - there's just no stopping you.

My dad read The Hobbit to me originally when I was young. So, it was the first imaginary landscape I ever had in my head from the written word. It gave me a passion for reading, thanks to my dad's performance of the book.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

I think books can give rise to empowerment.

I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable.

Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.

The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals.

If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.