Literary Masters Quotes

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

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

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

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.

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

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.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

I read Nabakov for style, Mary Karr for heart and resonance of where I come from. She's from the same part of the world that I'm from. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway, to read the masters.

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

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.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

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

The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.