Jack Vance Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

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

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.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

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.

Literature is news that stays news.

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.

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.

Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.

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.

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.

It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.