Anne Rice Quotes

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

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

I've been influenced by so many different writers along the way - from Charles Dickens, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, John D. McDonald, and so many others - that it would take a page or two to list them all.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

I think one of the reasons Stephen King's stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from.

There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

I'd love to meet Flannery O'Connor. I think I'd be content to hear her speak on any subject. What forces shaped her. What nebula of books and stories were whirling together inside her at the time of her death.

How many writers in history have ever been as famous as Stephen King? He casts an awfully long shadow.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.