Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.

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.

Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'

Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

I must suppose that reading wonderful writers may, inadvertently, teach an avid reader a great deal -- not only about life and other matters, but about how to write. Therefore doubtless I have benefited from frequent immersions in the glowing genius of others. It would be nice to think so. (I do actually think so). But to improve my skills will never be the prompting force of my reading -- that's just literary lust.

Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

I would rather be dead than not read

Every piece of writing starts from what I call a grit a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.