Influential Authors Quotes

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.

I've learned mainly by reading myself. So I don't think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I've read Phil Fisher. So I've gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don't have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

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

He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

I read a lot of science fiction, and it's ingrained, in a certain way, and I've been very involved with Kerouac and the Beats, but before that, it was a lot of science fiction.

I wanted to be a writer that had an impact. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.

There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.

At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.

England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens... I adopted them passionately.

Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

There are a number of things that I'm trying to get into the books. There's a meta-fictional aspect, if I may use that pretentious word, to writing anything. You're writing in the shadow of all the people that have gone before and, in a way, you're having a dialogue with them. As someone who's read J.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them.

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.... I keep it out of print.

Patrick Lencioni, Spencer Johnson, and Stephen Covey are great communicators.

I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.

Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin were the biggest inspirations for my work because they trod into areas considered to be owned by male writers and created these worlds that are infused with an understanding of so much more than just technology.