Arthur Phillips Quotes

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

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.

Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.

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

For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.

V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.

Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

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

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

Once, in an interview with 'V' magazine, I said that I preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway. I think that Hemingway is an amazing writer, but by being related to him, I had it in my head that I had to like him.