Philip Kerr Quotes

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

Lincoln is a genius of language and a brilliant writer who deserves to be seen as part of the canon of great writers in American literature.

Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.

I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.

Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Of John Le Carre's books, I've only read 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,' and I haven't read anything by Graham Greene, but I've heard a great deal about how 'Your Republic Is Calling You' reminded English readers of those two writers. I don't really have any particular interest in Cold War spy novels.

That's why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.