Dermot Healy Quotes

My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.

I want people to be open to the idea of sitting down and reading a Dickens book. They will also have a great time.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

I don't even know how people read new fiction anymore because there's so much old fiction that exists that seems great that's unread. It's overwhelming to me. But, I mean, I do read. But there probably haven't been many people less literate than me that have been in 'The Paris Review.'

One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!

When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.

It's like saying French shouldn't be taught because you don't understand it because it's new. Shakespeare is just like learning a new, exciting language.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that's why he's still so loved today.

Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

When I was really little, my favorite book was 'The BFG'. I read it - my teacher in, like, first grade read it to us. I love that book.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

I had an amazing teacher, who was Burmese, and she was living in Paris at the time, and she is one of very few who doesn't actually receive a credit in the film because she still has family over there.

I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.

I got introduced to Shakespeare at four years old, and I fell in love with the language.

Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn't like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read 'Northanger Abbey' sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn't read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

My grandfather was a history teacher, one reason the subject has been an integral part of my life.

When I was in grad school, I had to admit I hadn't read Toni Morrison. My teacher, the novelist Colum McCann, said I had to. I read 'Beloved' and 'Song of Solomon.' Pretty incredible.

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.

Certainly in the case of 'Gnomeo & Juliet,' if it makes children or adults a little more interested in Shakespeare, there's nothing wrong with that!