Alberto Manguel Quotes

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.

'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.

J. K. Rowling is one of my favourite authors, and I really admire how she created this big wizarding world. But I think our books are very, very different, and I don't think there can be a next J. K. Rowling. She is one of a kind.

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

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

As I grew up, I read and loved many fairy-tale retellings and began to think about writing my own reimagining of 'Rapunzel.'

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

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.

I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Rowling is a luminous storyteller. I love her sense of humor and the intricate wizarding world she built around Hogwarts. I think all writers aspire to be like her, to capture readers like she does. But I didn't think about 'Harry Potter' when I wrote 'The Bone Season.'

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.

Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

I'd love to meet Flannery O'Connor. I think I'd be content to hear her speak on any subject. What forces shaped her. What nebula of books and stories were whirling together inside her at the time of her death.

How many writers in history have ever been as famous as Stephen King? He casts an awfully long shadow.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

When I was starting to write, I was fascinated with 'Knuffle Bunny' by Mo Willems. I remember taking it home and typing it out, trying to figure out how it worked. It's just a classic, with dauntingly few words.

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.