Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

Jane Austen is one of my all-time favourites.

Pity the man who has a favorite restaurant, but not a favorite author.

In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

I’m rather apt to read old books than new.

I've always liked authors such as Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

I was a mess-up in school, a big mess-up. I was into history and English, because there were always stories, like 'Dracula' and World War II. I've never read a book, though. Never.

I read a lot when I was at college, but really, only a few of Dickens's books work for me.

Do I read her books? Of course.

What's your favorite book? "The last one I read.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

[Madame Nhu was] the Sandra Dee of South Vietnam. If I were cast on a desert island with her, I would quickly make friends with the natives.

People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful.

All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?

I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore.

I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing.

Read much, but not too many books.