Biographies Quote by David Levering Lewis

I wanted to pay homage to someone who was such an important literary figure in my life. I think Langston Hughes would be proud…

— Kasi Lemmons

Wesley Stace has always been the only genuinely gifted fiction writer who also happens to be a rock star, but Wonderkid is the book…

— Sam Lipsyte

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths.…

— Henry Louis Gates

I'm very confident that Nick Hornby always gets it right as a writer. He has the vernacular and passion. He is adroit and dry,…

— Pierce Brosnan

The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)

— Tobias Smollett

The one author who has influenced my writing the most is the English writer John Fowles, who wrote 'The French Lieutenant's Woman,' 'The Magus,'…

— Elizabeth George

One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I'm deeply inspired by all of his work - I rip him off constantly.

— Conor Oberst

William Trevor is an author I admire; his stories are subtle and powerful, and beautifully written.

— Kim Edwards

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

— Alan Furst

One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.

— David Grann

“Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses,…

— Vladimir Nabokov

“In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older,…

— Gustave Flaubert