Ayushmann Khurrana Quotes

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

I don't chase publishers. Publishers chase me.

I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.

As far as fame, the everlasting fame thing. I used to think that was important for a writer... the desire to make your mark.

If you call it a romance, it will never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other respectable literary venue. And that's okay. I can live with that.

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

If we want good stories, writers should be given their due.

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

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.

There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.

Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

There is nothing more important than writing well for the young, if literature is to have a continuance ... They will inherit the earth; and nothing that we value will endure in the world unless they can be persuaded to value it too.

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.

Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.

I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.