Literary Appeal Quotes

Also, most people read fiction as an escape - and I wonder whether my books aren't a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

...book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel: book-buyers want a good story...something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.

Paul just had a way about him that was different. I was really attracted to his writing.

'Mystic River' just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity.

The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.

Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.

One of the many things that surprised me about 'Wool' is how many of its fans don't consider themselves science fiction readers.

Women are not apt to be won by the charms of verse.

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, & the imagination’s hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

'The Great Gatsby' ticked so many boxes for me.

I don't know if foreigners will take to my novels or not. It may be that my books appeal only to a particular gender or age group rather than convey a more universal appeal.

No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I'm seldom drawn to a book unless it's by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.

I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience.

My character in 'Primeval' is a bookworm but she is very sexy.

If it's not gripping you, you are reading the wrong book.