Morgan Spector Quotes

I adore anything Michael Alexis writes.

I've liked Pete Gurney's writing always.

Interviewing Hugh McIlvanney, I got to read lots of his stuff again. I'm a big fan of his writing.

I am a huge fan of Amitav Ghosh's work. I wish I could meet him.

I am not a Hemingway aficionado.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

I like Philip Larkin an awful lot; I really like his view on life, and I really connect to it.

I am a big devourer of James Baldwin.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

I have been called 'The American De Maupassant.' Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer.

I want to leave behind a literary legacy.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerful prose; it's also his charitable works.

I wondered if people might not have had enough of Simon Armitage and wondered whether I hadn't had enough of Simon Armitage.

I've never spoken to Bon Iver, but I would love to. I'm a huge fan!

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

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.

I've been a fan of Jack Vance since before I was in high school.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.