Sonya Walger Quotes

I'm a reader. I like - I'm a great reader. I keep going back, though, to certain authors, just like I love film, but I keep going back to just five or six certain filmmakers. In literature I like Chekhov, for example; I think he's my favorite. And Flaubert - you know, that kind of concision. But I also like Tolstoy; I love those romances that, you know, weigh 500 pounds and take months and months and months to read.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

We filed a constitutional rights lawsuit on my reservation, and I had to go out and interview all these old people. And I found that many of the old people on my reservation didn't know who was president. That kind of pointed out to me the irrelevance at times of who is in Washington.

I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

I like Chekov a lot.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

Some writers you return to again and again, and for me, Nancy Mitford is one of them.

I mean, I knew of Jane Austen's work, and I guess I'm a fan at a distance insofar as from a literary point of view, it's beautifully written.

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

I read anything I could get my hands on: science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers. I even became hooked on the Bantam reprints of the old pulp novels from thirties and forties: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger.

Great old books of the great old authors are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get his own belief.

I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.

I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

I'm a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.