Caitlin Flanagan Quotes

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

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

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights into the literary world. Reading about the love letters novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife Vera blew my mind. Fascinating.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

I grew up reading a lot on literature and all of that.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.