Daniel Mendelsohn Quotes

I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.

I grew up reading - and loving - stories by Andre Norton. I admired and idolised her from afar. Her stories helped shape my own internal world.

I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.

Jean Plaidy was the greatest influence on me.

As Richard Pryor was to Eddie Murphy, that's what Kurt Vonnegut was to me.

P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.

Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

When I started 'First Blood,' back in 1968, I was deeply influenced by Geoffrey Household's 'Rogue Male.'

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.

I was a nut for Dostoevsky. You can tell a lot from what people read between those ages. My brother was a Steinbeck freak and now he lives in a little village in New Hampshire and he's a baker.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

I know that by the time I was in middle school, Andre Norton was definitely my favorite author.

I grew up with probably three different authors having a seminal influence on my childhood, Dr. Seuss being one and Maurice Sendak being another.

I read so many books when I was a kid that I didn't even know were shaping me up.

When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.

The kids who leave their favorite authors behind do not in fact leave us utterly abandoned, but in due time drive children of their own to the bookstore and the post office.

The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever -- they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work.

I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish.

I don't think I came out of anybody. I think I developed out of the influences I described in My Dark Places. American history, L.A. of the 1950s. I'm comfortable with that.

My life has been greatly influenced by many books which I have never read.

How do things, whether they are movies, or plays, Hamilton, or people, ideas - how do they become transformative or iconic? That is in some ways what the actual Star Wars saga gets at, with the tale of the rise and the fall of the empire and the rise and the fall of Republics.

The game will fade one day. I realize that success is one thing; impact is another. I live to impact people.