Writers On Writers

“Of all German writers, it is Goethe to whom I owe most, who occupies me most, claims my attention, encourages me, who forces me to emulation or opposition.”
Hermann Hesse

“O’Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do.”
Tennessee Williams

“Anthony Trollope trained himself to turn out forty-nine pages of manuscript a week, seven pages a day, and he was so rigorous about keeping to that exact number of pages that if he finished a novel halfway through the last day, he’d write the title of a new book and ‘Chapter One’ on the next page and go right on until he’d done his proper quota of seven pages.”
Malcolm Cowley

“I don’t think I knew what real poetry was till I read Keats a couple of years ago.”
Isaac Rosenberg

“When William Blake says something, I say thank you, even though he has uttered the most hopeless fallacy that you can imagine.”
John Berryman

“I’ve always thought that MacNeice had limitations of temperament. He sometimes seems to be writing a jazzy, crazy kind of poetry, but when you look closer you realise that it’s always perfectly controlled. Inside MacNeice there was always an academic scholar pulling in the rein.”
Stephen Spender

“The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.”
Anthony Burgess

“I think that Brecht was a good producer, but not really a poet or a dramatist, except in his early plays.”
Eugène Ionesco

“I like Colette a great deal—I’ve learned a lot from the way she uses herself as a character in her own books and tantalizes the reader with the question: Is this autobiography or is it fiction?”
Edmund White

“As an undergraduate at Syracuse University I discovered Nietzsche, and it may be the Nietzschean influence that characterizes some of my work.”
Joyce Carol Oates

Sources: The Paris Review, Brainy Quote

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Writers On Writers

“The trouble with Freudian psychology is that it is based exclusively on a study of the sick. Freud never met a healthy human being—only patients and other psychoanalysts. “
Aldous Huxley

“I don’t know what service I provided for Cheever except to be delighted with his work.”
William Maxwell

“Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”
Jean Cocteau

“I’ve tried to read Proust so often, and I recognize the beauty of his style, but he puts me to sleep.”

Ray Bradbury

“Nabokov is a natural dandy on the grand international scale.”
Anthony Burgess

“Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.”
Ernest Hemingway

“Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking.”
Flann O’Brien

“What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!”
Tennessee Williams

“Only a technique like Faulkner’s could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing.”
García Márquez

“Beckett destroys language with silence.”
Eugène Ionesco

Sources: The Paris Review, Brainy Quote