Ira Glass Quotes

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

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

William Trevor is an author I admire; his stories are subtle and powerful, and beautifully written.

I was reading some Raymond Carver. I really liked how he did that 'slice of life' thing. Because I'm not much of a reader I end up finding out about these things a long time after other people.

I'm the biggest Chekov fan - there's something that he does that not many other writers do.

I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower.

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

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

I like Raymond Carver's poetry a lot.

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

I love to read things that I'm sure won't make a movie.

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

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 love writing shorter fiction.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

I love Martin Amis.

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

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.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love.