Robert Harris Quotes

George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.

I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.

I'd always been a great fan of George Orwell.

Jean Plaidy was the greatest influence on me.

Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.

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

I don't write political stuff. I'm sure I've made attempts, but I don't tend to write very topical things, either. I admire those people who do because it's a talent I don't have.

I grew up in Nagpur, and I first started enjoying the author Harishankar Parsai. He wrote mostly satire, essays on the current situation and social issues. He wrote many books and I think he was my first influence.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale.

I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.

A lot of political music to me can be rather pedantic and corny, and when it's done right - like Bruce Springsteen or Jackson Browne or great satire from Randy Newman, there's nothing better.

Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

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.

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy.

Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

Everybody who's ever influenced me, from a Richard Prior to a Whoopie Goldberg to, you know, any of the voices that have resonated with me as a performer since I was a kid, you know, you couldn't really say that their work didn't have some element of political commentary in it.

Bill Maher fancies himself the reincarnation of Lenny Bruce.

I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

When I read Frank Miller's 'The Dark Knight Returns', I think it's a wonderful record of the Reagan era. I think it's amazing. This is the time I lived in.