Leland Ryken Quotes

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

I excelled in English while I was at school.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

I really liked English literature, a subject I did really well at.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.