Kanye West Quotes

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

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

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

A book makes claims of literary art.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.