Writers On Writers

“Every crime writer has been influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even if only subconsciously.”
P. D James

“The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.”
Aldous Huxley

“I was terribly disturbed when I first read D. H Lawrence.”
Alice Munro

“After Malcolm Bradbury, my other important mentor was Angela Carter, who taught me a lot about the business of writing.”
Kazuo Ishiguro

“John Cowper Powys is really interested in sex, just as keen on it as Lawrence, but he understands and portrays it far better.”
Irish Murdoch

“Austen has always been a bit hit-or-miss with me, I must say.”
Julian Barnes

“I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted…the pretentious nonsense of Mr Pound, that total fake.”
Vladimir Nabokov

“The Quiet American by Graham Greene…is a terrific, terrific book.”
Stephen King

“Charles Dickens wrote about Bill Sikes bludgeoning Nancy to death, getting blood all over everything, but if a woman had written that, nobody would have published it.”
Margaret Atwood

“Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read.”
Toni Morrison

Sources: Google Books, The Paris Review, Brainy Quote

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Writers On Writers

“Important novelists often say that writing a novel is hard. I think Anthony Powell said it was like conducting foreign policy—that you have to be prepared to go and do it every day no matter how you feel.”
James Salter

“Beryl Bainbridge understood the absurdity of life and how humour lurks in even the most tragic situation.”
Deborah Moggach

“Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer . . . in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.”
Hunter S. Thompson

“There was a period in my early career that was determined by the images of women writers I was exposed to—women writers as genius suicides like Virginia Woolf.”
Margaret Atwood

“Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry.”
T. S Eliot

“In writing She Came to Stay, I was certainly influenced by Hemingway insofar as it was he who taught us a certain simplicity of dialogue and the importance of the little things in life.”
Simone de Beauvoir

“I find Faulkner intolerably bad.”
Evelyn Waugh

“Rebecca West’s novel The Fountain Overflows taught me a lot.”
Andrea Barrett

“Every year or so I read Shakespeare straight through.”
P.G. Wodehouse

“Updike is a master of effortless motion — between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic.”
Ian McEwan

Sources: Bartleby, The Independent, The Paris Review, Wikiquote