Ayobami Adebayo Quotes

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.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing.

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.

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

Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.

Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

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.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

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

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

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.

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.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.