Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

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.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I'm deeply inspired by all of his work - I rip him off constantly.

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

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

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.

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.

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.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

I can appreciate other writers' works.