Literary Opinion Quotes

I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

Half a King is my favorite book by Joe Abercrombie so far, and that's saying something.

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.

I've never got on very well with Jane Austen.

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

I've never been that keen on Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.

I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don't rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that's why I do not like him.

Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce.

I happen to think Martin Cruz Smith is very good.

I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.

I'm not a huge Lovecraft fan as far as that goes; I think there are some stories of his that are really quite wonderful, but for the most part, I have great difficulties with his prose - and the more you know about the man, the harder it is to separate him from the work in many ways.

I think 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned' might be a perfect book.