Literary Icons Quotes

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.

There are perennial stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Sherlock Holmes' and those sorts of things, which have been around since almost as long as film, and 'Frankenstein' is another one. They're perennial favorites, which get remade every 20 years, and that's OK.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that's the reason we go back to them over and over.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

Disinterring famous people has become a kind of sport in the Hispanic world. Before Cervantes, it happened to Evita, Che Guevara, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda.

Thank God we don't know a lot about Shakespeare or Moses or Homer or Lautreamont. These are the best guys we got, and their art is powerful because they're mysterious.

[On the writers she admires:] I prefer dead writers, because I don't see them at parties.

I have some role models. In Brazil, they are mostly writers. A writer named Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto is my favorite. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is also a very important figure for me.

I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.

The sightless Milton, with his hair Around his placid temples curled; And Shakespeare at his side,-a freight, If clay could think and mind were weight, For him who bore the world!

I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.