Literary Taste Quotes

I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

I don't really read a lot. I got a few Booker Prize books and some others and thought I'd try this but quite quickly I just stick them down. I do like some Stephen King books but with some of them I just put them down as well. But I'm like that with telly stuff as well and films or music.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

I'm reading 'Ten Storey Love Song' by Richard Milward. I read his first novel, 'Apples,' after hearing a reading of his in the Hague. I really enjoyed it, so I've started this one.

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

I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.

France at the dinner table in faraway places; but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic; to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

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 used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

My favourite writers are columnists.

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

I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

I was never a 'Mills and Boon' kind of a person.

I've been a fan of Jack Vance since before I was in high school.

When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you're a kid, you like books because they're pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it.

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?'

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

I've always had an affinity for writers who have a poetry background, so I always liked Tennessee Williams.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.