Literary Styles Quotes

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

Literature precedes genre.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

I didn't know what the word 'genre' meant till I was twenty years old.

I am undependable. You might get gritty contemporary with one book, science fiction, magical realism, or high fantasy with another.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

Young writers should definitely research the current sounds and styles.

Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.