Matthew Pearl Quotes

Literature precedes genre.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

All literature is gossip.

My master's degree was in English literature.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

Writing a book is not easy.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

I'm not a writer who refuses to talk about a book until I've finished.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.

I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.