Regional Literature Quotes

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.

If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don't have the luxury of being apolitical. You can't say, 'That's politics. I'm just doing my work.'

I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

There is a wealth of readership for regional language literature in India that is not given importance. We must give respect to our own languages.

Since my schooldays, I've read the translations of Bengali writers. I'm Punjabi, but I read a lot of Bengali and Urdu literature.

In the past, I've felt like an outsider, with New York the center of everything literary, but right now, there are new opportunities being created that let us tell stories in the South, whether the medium is writing or TV or reality TV.

I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'

Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

There are distinctions between Indian and Pakistani writers.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

I've made the decision to adhere to three general truths when it comes to my novels: There will be a love-story element to the story, the novel will be set in eastern North Carolina, and the characters will be likeable. Then, I make each novel unique through differences in voice, perspective, age and personalities of the characters, and of course, plot.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because those communities were never in the way of producing books.

I don't really think the outburst is recent; there have always been writers in Appalachia.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

I like fiction set in the South, and I'm a fan of literary westerns.

In the South, it is different, they have a audience that is literate.