Henning Mankell Quotes

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

Great books are rare.

I've been told there's a special golden shelf, in the secret vault kept at the back of every bookstore in America, that contains the Bible, 'War and Peace,' and 'Driving Mr. Albert.'

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.

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

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

You know, I'm really not interested in someone telling me that something's good or bad.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

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.

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!

For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

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 truth is, I can't help the way people perceive anything, from the role of financial industry in the economic crisis, to the place of women's fiction in the canon of modern literature, to the rank of mint chocolate chip ice cream as a favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor.

There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.

In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.

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

I'm not the best at choosing what's good and what's bad. I wouldn't even know what's a good pop song and what's a bad one. With that said, I wanted to say what's true to me. Some people might say that the Skrillex record was pop, but that was just about the chemistry between me and my boy.

It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much.

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 won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.