Literary Preference Quotes

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.

I don't know why, but I respond well to tortured characters.

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

The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.

I was a massive Tolkien fan. 'The Hobbit' was... my favorite book as a little girl, and the Silvan Elves were my favorite characters in the book.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

I'm a poetry-skipper myself. I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country - make it any other two persons. This doesn't mean that I hate poetry. I don't feel that strongly about it. It only means that those who wish to communicate with me by means of the written word must do so in prose.

I am trying to concentrate on books. You know, I love Dostoevsky; he's my favourite writer.

I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.

I read a lot when I was at college, but really, only a few of Dickens's books work for me.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.

I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

You come home to find your 17-year-old daughter engrossed in a book. Which would delight you more - if it were 'Twilight' or 'Middlemarch?'

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

I’m rather apt to read old books than new.

There are loads of novels that I really love, like Haruki Murakami's books, and when I read them, I do think about how they would work as an anime. But I do believe that those are great books because they work best as novels, or great manga work best in that form.

I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.

I should infinitely prefer a book.

I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.

Pearl Buck was my mother's favorite author.