Molly Antopol Quotes

Whatever I'm reading at the moment seems to influence whatever I'm writing.

I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.

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.

Authors are influenced by everything they've ever read. If you've read widely enough, it helps you create your own mix.

People such as Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats were a huge influence on me, not just in what they were saying, but how they said it.

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.

Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.

I always wanted to be a writer. In the beginning, I thought I had to rewrite 'Gone with the Wind,' but eventually, I found my way and realized that wasn't me.

If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

I read 'The Young Landlords' and felt almost a chemical change. What I realized while reading that book was that I could write in my voice, use my tongue, my language, my style, and write a story.

I always envision myself being a Hemingway type.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

You want to write something as good as what you've read.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.