Sara Sheridan Quotes

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

There is a wealth of readership for regional language literature in India that is not given importance. We must give respect to our own languages.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I'm grateful that I've enjoyed the support of libraries, bookshops and institutional funders.

I remember reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an 'Aha!' moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter.

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.

Who of English speech, bred to the traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in his 'inky cloak' at a glance? Not to know him would argue one's self untaught in the chief glories of his language.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation's mind in writing and the concentration of intellect for the purpose of spreading itself abroad and multiplying its energy

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

The appellation of a Scottish Bard is by far my highest pride; to continue to deserve it is my most exalted ambition.

O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.

When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.

If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don't have the luxury of being apolitical. You can't say, 'That's politics. I'm just doing my work.'

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.

I think people in the north and the south and the east and the west, anywhere they come from, are just as interesting, and they're humans. They have the same realm of emotions that we all have. But I'm just more drawn to the Southern character and the different types, and Southern literature is so lyrical and so wonderful.

Authors have a nationality; books do not.

Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.

For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that all the cows in India look the same and have identical horns.

A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe's finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.

There are distinctions between Indian and Pakistani writers.