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The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.
My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
I'm a big Stephen King fan.
An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.
John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.
Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.
Writes very good books; about very bad things.
There is Harlan Ellison the human being, who takes a crap a couple of times a day, and who farts, and who eats chicken croquettes, if I can find them. And then there is the writer, this writer-person, who is a much finer person than I. Much more orderly, much more meaningful. Worthier, than I [am].
A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor ... The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.
The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P.G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.
James Joyce's Ulysses
Rilke to wake up. I don't read any books in which women
The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.
Salinger, Plath, Toole, the literature of choice for the brooding outcast.
Gutenberg, your printing press has been violated by this evil book, Mein Kampf!
Proust is a huge author for me.
Dystopian Cybernetic Environment in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
A bookworm-one of those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas ... " - "Earth's Holocaust", Hawthorne
Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.
A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
I'm a huge Stephen King fan.
Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
Nietzsche's my favorite. He's just insane.
Literature is humanity talking to itself.
I have a troubled relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, not just because he kicked me out of a bar but also because it's become clear to me that he was not a good person.
We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.
...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...
The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett
Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.
Hay he's a great writer and i like him a lot
Billy Pilgrim: "You guys go on without me. I'll be alright."
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Every writer has something to say, but those writers whose works endure have dared to say something about the things that frighten them, confuse them, challenge them, and occasionally delight them.
An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Joseph Mattson is a monster of a writer.
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
Love that Literature.
I really began to love to read while in high school, and my favorite authors were my heroes: J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut.
I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E.
van Vogt.
Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog
Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary website.
I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo."
"Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?
Often touching ... Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips ... In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurb.
Please welcome Professor Varen Nethers, famous depressed dead poets historian and author of the bestselling books Unlocking your Poe-tential: A Writer's Guide, and Mo Poe Fo Yo: When You Just Can't Get Enough.
As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
Edith Vonnegut behaved like a guest in her children's lives. To her way of thinking, parenting came under the general heading of household tasks, which, as a wealthy woman, she could pay others to do.
Who says only long tedious novels are good to read when all that can be summed up in one line
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.
I've always been interested in a certain kind of sophistication in children's literature. I loved Roald Dahl; I loved the underlying nastiness of some of his - darkness of his tales.
I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn't realise political writing could be so funny.
FYI, this book is not that serious. This is meant to be read when super bored, then forgotten fifteen minutes later. It could be read cover-to-cover during one medium-to-severe case of diarrhea.
I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.
Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
There was something nice about a man who was absorbed by a good book.
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.
With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge.
The ways of the Lord," I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant."
"Adler?"
"Theodor Reik, I think.
I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.
The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
Literature is the voice of the human heart.
I'm a huge Cormac McCarthy fan and have read every book of his.
Literature today is like elevator music for a narcoleptic.
Books, like good friends, should be few and well chosen. SAMUEL PATERSON
Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.
The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.
Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.
I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
Ah, Houellebecq. I've only read him in English translations so I'm sure I'm not getting the full greatness of his work, but golly, he writes better sex scenes than anyone else alive.
I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
Many's the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death.
I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'
For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.
The Most Dangerous Book In America
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
Of all unfortunate men one of the unhappiest is a middling author endowed with too lively a sensibility for criticism.
It is dangerous to condemn stories as junk which satisfy the deep hunger of millions of people. These books are not literary art, but a great deal of what is acclaimed as literary art in our time offers no comfort or fulfillment to anybody.
Writer speaks a stench.
Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.
Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.
I myself find him a master of utterly terminal pessimism, appalled by all that an insane humanity may yet survive to do. We are pollution. He wants us to feel no pity for Homo sapiens, and so excludes appealing women and children from his tales.
When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance.
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.
Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an 'injustice collector' and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
I love Roald Dahl.
Fiction is overrated, Fly. We've discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that's what counts.
It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is.
Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.
My favourite author is Leon Trotsky - the political philosophy and the way he writes is beautiful, and really relevant, too.
Writing 'Schottenfreude' has reinforced the fact that there are few, if any, emotions that have not been experienced, and analyzed, by some of the world's greatest writers.
Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
Good books, like good food, are meant to be savored and digested slowly overtime - Konnrad