Ilya Ehrenburg Quotes

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

I do see, in some younger writers, elements and things that I have used - and I am very touched and flattered because I am part of a tapestry that is being absorbed by authors.

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.

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

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.

Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.

I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

There are a number of things that I'm trying to get into the books. There's a meta-fictional aspect, if I may use that pretentious word, to writing anything. You're writing in the shadow of all the people that have gone before and, in a way, you're having a dialogue with them. As someone who's read J.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them.

Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

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.

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

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

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

Literature is news that stays news.

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 can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

It was the last generation of writers [ the Cheers] that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.

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.