Fiona Shaw Quotes

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

I think every writer wants future generations to read what he has written.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

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.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

Literature is news that stays news.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.