David Milch Quotes

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

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 actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson.

I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

Literature precedes genre.

I was an English major.

I was an English major in college!

The writer studies literature, not the world.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

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.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.