Linda Grant Quotes

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

Many books have mattered enormously to my life and work. 'David Copperfield' by Charles Dickens would be one of several contenders for 'most influential.' I first read it at 13 and have reread it dozens of times since.

I still connect with original emotions. 'Night Moves' was written about 1961 or 1962 when I was in high school, and it was about what my friends and I did in that period.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

The first book I really loved was 'Little Women' - I'd have given anything for Beth to have been allowed to live; I remember crying very much over her death, trying to make the words change just by staring at them. I loved 'Anne of Green Gables,' too; 'What Katy Did;' and 'Peter Pan.'

'Island of the Blue Dolphins' by Scott O'Dell had a huge impact on me.

I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.

I have a nostalgia for the years I was growing up and experiencing new things for the first time - so the late '80s and early '90s are always fascinating to me. Those were the times that I was being informed about a lot of my tastes, and so the memories are fused with a lot of emotion.

When I was a little girl, my first link to the world was as a reader. Sometimes, I feel a nostalgia for those times, for all the emotions I felt as a child - discovering novels, discovering Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoevsky. I wanted to be like those men.

I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

For the Tintin books were my emotional universe. To read them felt quite simply like being loved: in advance and by an entire world of pure possibility, my future. But to write to the author was to reach out for the lover. Even today, the power of reading one remains visceral: each book acts as a form of transportation, not just to the emotional landscape of this first literary love affair but to very specific memories.

The great thing about the movies ... is-you're giving people little ... tiny pieces of time ... that they never forget.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you are there, in everything I am, in everything I've ever done, and looking back, I know that I should have told you know much you've always meant to me.

Yogi Bear changed my life in ways that I can't explain because it's not a full feature on me.

I'm quite happy to leave it still feeling that way, leave it before it starts feeling like a job. ... I have such fond memories of watching 'Doctor Who' when I was a kid and growing up, that if I've left anybody anywhere with memories as fond, then I feel like I've done my job.

A good book is an event in my life.

I remember watching Romeo + Juliet when I was 14 and listening to the soundtrack. When I hear that soundtrack now, all those emotions come back. It's really beautiful when you're at a certain point in your life where most of the adventure lies ahead of you. And it's a sad thing when you feel like you've lost that. But you can get it back.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?