Paul Di Filippo Quotes

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.

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.

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 liked Hemingway better before I began to be called 'Hemingwayesque.'

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

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

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

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.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

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.

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

There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

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.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

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

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

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.

Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.

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.