Paul Valery Quotes

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

Poe was such a tragic and brilliant figure; he's somebody whom I've been somewhat obsessed with my whole life. I first read 'The Tell-Tale Heart' at age four.

Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story.

Edgar Allan Poe is amazing because he was so dark. He's from Baltimore and so cynical that you can feel it when you're reading, it feels so honest.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

I am drawn to Americana, and I am drawn to gothic stories, and I love American gothic stories.

I think John le Carre is, at 77, the greatest living writer alive. He is a master craftsman.

My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

I briefly considered doing Edgar Allan Poe and just swearing a lot.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.

We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.

Your biggest influences are the earliest ones. When I was young, I was very influenced by the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

Only bad writers think they're good.

I love horror, mystery, and science fiction, and Poe was one of the founding fathers of those worlds.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.