Literary Influences Quotes

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do.

I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason.

And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every haw ~ Sarah Schmelling

My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong. ~ Langston Hughes

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life. ~ Manuel Puig

Teach a child to read and he/she will pass a literary test. ~ George W. Bush

For mysticism proper - as distinguished from philosophical theory or vague feeling or literary pleasure - is a practical thing, something more than a doctrine, a life. ~ Fr. Augustine Baker

For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte to swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run, for a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us have not. ~ H.M. Tomlinson

I think that there is a bias in the current literary climate, which is not only very Western but very male. ~ Gish Jen

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. ~ Robertson Davies

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

Besides,love is only a feeling. ~ Christina Westover

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den. ~ Phillip Adams

I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career. ~ Bill Nighy

To learn is as beautiful as to live.
Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own. Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge. Never fear. The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by this sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great. ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer-a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory-into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values ... more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved. ~ David Foster Wallace

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. ~ C.S. Lewis

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. ~ Virginia Woolf

Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages. ~ Bill Vaughan

We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.
That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.
Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!"
And everything which is by now comprised in the traditional, even literary, image of an arrest will pile up and take shape, not in your own disordered memory, but in what your family and your neighbors in your apartment remember: The sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door.
The insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security operatives. The frightened and cowed civilian witness at their backs. (And what function does this civilian witness serve? The victim doesn't even dare think about it and the operatives don't remember, but that's what the regulations call for, and so he has to sit there all night long and sign in the morning. 1 For the witness, jerked from his bed, it is torture too - to go out night after night to help arrest his own neighbors and acquaintances. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The danger, then, is that materialism is not only shaping how we live but the way we think as well. It influences our consumer tastes and our preference for high-paying jobs, but it also alters our capacity to pray, the nature of our prayers, and the ways in which religious tutelage instructs our values. ~ Robert Wuthnow

I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.
This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in. ~ Tennessee Williams

I've seen middle grade books criticized by adult readers for leaving things for the reader to figure out, for not having perfect happily-ever-after endings. They get knocked for being too depressing, for using too many big words, for featuring parental characters who are too clueless. Girl protagonists are "too angry" or "too self-absorbed." The issues raised are "too heavy," the books "too earnest," "too quiet," "too hard," "too far-reaching," "too strange," and it is all too too much for the reader.

Except it's never the readers themselves saying these things.

Our critical discourse in middle grade is sometimes much more about what the reviewer believes children's books should be rather than about engaging with the book itself and the literature as a whole. When we say a book is "too sad," "too scary," "too complicated;" when we demand that endings are perfectly happy and all tied up; when we demand that the themes not be too weighty or the characters not face too much hardship; we are projecting our own biases onto the book, and using them to prescribe what books for this age range can or cannot do. This is nannying, not literary criticism - and it doesn't give kids much credit. ~ Anne Ursu

My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now. ~ John Hodgman

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind. ~ Susan Sontag

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit
And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.
As on the land while here the ocean gains.
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away
One science only will one genius fit,
So vast is art, so narrow human wit
Not only bounded to peculiar arts,
But oft in those confined to single parts
Like kings, we lose the conquests gained before,
By vain ambition still to make them more
Each might his several province well command,
Would all but stoop to what they understand. ~ Alexander Pope

The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century. ~ Ken Follett

In addition to the artistic influences, I am influenced by my current private life, my feelings about it and my energy level and state of health. ~ Frank Auerbach

To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and our unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them. ~ Henri Bergson

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

If you'll curtail your literary pursuits a moment I'll introduce you to my counterpart and Nemesis; I would be trite and say, 'to my better half,' but I think that phrase indicates some kind of basically equal division, don't you? ~ Ken Kesey

Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning. ~ Marina Warner

What do you mean to do?'
'Make literary history, I guess. ~ Paula McLain

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

It is dancing that brings together tribes from all over North America to compete against each other [in pow wows], to share traditional similarities and differences, and to let non-aboriginal people learn about the first cultures on this continent. The dances change over the years, reflecting new generations and their influences, adapting the traditions of their grandparents and their grandparents' grandparents, to be able to exist in this rapidly evolving world.

"There will always be the elders who shake their heads at the younger generation's behaviour and teenagers who push the boundaries of traditions they have been taught. In dancing, though, everyone can be on the same beat, regardless of their fancy footwork or swirling shawls. ~ Lori Henry