Influential Reading Quotes

There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

I think Roland read 'Primal Scream' first and then gave it to me. This was, I think, even prior to 'The Graduate' days. We both got heavily into and it offered a lot of questions about how screwed up our home life was.

Probably the most formative experience was reading the 'Foundation' trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read, but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear was kind of my first important book

I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.

The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'

I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books.

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.