Jeremy Irvine Quotes

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.

I'm a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Don Quixote'.

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

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 wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.

I fell in love with 19th-century Russian plays.

Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.