Michael Moorcock Quotes

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

I read my first P.G. Wodehouse when I was 12.

I was brought up on Dickens. I remember reading 'Bleak House' but, coming back to it, I didn't remember much about it apart from a few characters.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

I've read a lot of Terry Pratchett's stuff, probably from when I was, like, 14.

No author's writing more influenced my own than that of Robert Louis Stevenson. My first steampunk story, 'The Ape-box Affair,' is a sort of melange of Stevenson and P.G. Wodehouse.

I used to read a lot of Steinbeck, and I admired Roger Miller and Bob Dylan.

I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.

When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

Writers don't write writing, they write reading. When I was a kid, I read four or five books a week. And that is how I became a writer.

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

I know that by the time I was in middle school, Andre Norton was definitely my favorite author.

People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

I'm a big James Baldwin fan.

I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.

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

I grew up in adoration of writers like Hemingway, George Orwell, Anna Akhmatova, and that has always been my idea about the artist - that you have to be a brave and freedom-loving person.