American Authors Quotes

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson, and Cory Doctorow.

I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow.

I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

[ Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher] introduced us to these authors early on and taught us that their literature is important. Langston Hughes - we read his poetry. We studied who W.E.B DuBois was. And so she whetted our appetites.

I'm an enormous fan of American literature, and especially the great novels of Larry McMurtry, 'Lonesome Dove,' Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard.

I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

Henry David Thoreau was an oddball job quitter and ne'er-do-well who evolved into the bearded sage of literature, natural history, and civil liberties.

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

I never got too specialized but did like the Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

I'm a big Hemingway and Salinger fan.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

Fitzgerald was a modernist.

The great thing about America is I always come back with more books and more tip-offs of who to read. It's a country in love with crime fiction.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature - I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

Some newer writers worry about books set in Canada having a big appeal, but it has never been an issue for me. I haven't wanted to write in the States because I don't know the States.

Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously.

I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.