Jerome Charyn Quotes

I'm a huge Cormac McCarthy fan and have read every book of his.

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.

If I could require the president to read one book, it would be Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". I gives a sense of the fragility of the world. Plus each sentence is very short -- about the length of a tweet.

I find 'True Grit' to be one of the very best American novels: It is a rousing adventure story and deeply perceptive about the makeup of the American character.

In its rather clinical view of death, 'True Grit' rivals the hardboiled world of 'Red Harvest'-era Dashiell Hammett and prefigures Cormac McCarthy by 20 years.

I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard.

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?

'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'

Noting that Huckleberry Finn was originally both valued and reviled because it shows the reader that the accepted moral code and social hierarchy is not always correct.

The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character.

Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.

The kind of stuff I usually read is a bit more on the literary side, like books that I think are influential in the sense that they're doing pulpy subject matter in a refined way. Like 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy; I loved that book.

There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

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

The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

I respond to authenticity and originality, and I've been a fan of Don Winslow's ever since 'The Power Of The Dog.'

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'