Writers On Writers

“I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys the rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very personal things.”
Michel Houellebecq

“There’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based.”
John Banville

“It’s so much better, you see, for me, when a writer like Edna St. Vincent Millay speaks so deeply about her concern for herself and does not offer us any altruisms.”
Maya Angelou

“Dostoyevsky was one of the first writers…to identify a crisis of modern civilization: that every one of us is visited by contradictory voices, contradictory physical urges.”
Czeslaw Milosz

“I think Miss [Mary] McCarthy is often brilliant and sometimes even sound. But, in fiction, she is a lady writer, a lady magazine writer.”
Lillian Hellman

“Poe’s stories still inhabit my head.”
Susan Sontag

“Eudora Welty has tremendous class, not just in her work, but in the way she walks, the look in her eyes, the way she has conducted her life.”
Ken Kesey

“I suppose E. M. Forster is the best.”
Dorothy Parker

“I often feel about Fitzgerald that he couldn’t distinguish between innocence and social climbing.”
Saul Bellow

“Naipaul is a great person to read before you have to do a piece.”
Joan Didion

Source: The Paris Review 

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Writers On Writers

“Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature.”
William Shawn

“I don’t like Dostoevsky. He is like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and in order to belong to the light professing love, all love.”
D.H. Lawrence

“Willa Cather. I loved Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock—really all of her work.”
Paula Fox

“Hey—Walt Whitman, isn’t he magnificent?”
Jim Crace

“Well, now I’m over sixty I can simply say this: the reception of my early books was completely meshed up with the fact that my sister Margaret Drabble was a writer.”
A. S. Byatt

“Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight.”
James Ellroy

“Katherine Anne Porter was an influence on me.”
Nadine Gordimer

“Pascal was the shock of my life. I was fifteen. I was on a class trip to Germany, my first trip abroad, and strangely I had brought the Pensées of Pascal.”
Michel Houellebecq

“I remember at one point going through everything of Eugene O’Neill’s. I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays.”
Joan Didion

“When I said that Zola was my favourite writer, I meant that I loved his courage, his indignation.”
Anita Brookner

Sources: The Paris Review, GoodReads