Zadie Smith Quotes

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.... I keep it out of print.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

The literature from which I come is rather large.

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 have some role models. In Brazil, they are mostly writers. A writer named Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto is my favorite. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is also a very important figure for me.

I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.

I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow.

A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.

I used to read a lot of Steinbeck, and I admired Roger Miller and Bob Dylan.

A man is known by the books he reads.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

It was the last generation of writers [ the Cheers] that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.

There are a number of things that I'm trying to get into the books. There's a meta-fictional aspect, if I may use that pretentious word, to writing anything. You're writing in the shadow of all the people that have gone before and, in a way, you're having a dialogue with them. As someone who's read J.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them.

He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.

Invariably it turns out to be who you've been reading in the last couple of weeks, and two hours or two days [on favourite authors

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.