Beckett Quote by Harold Bloom

If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed…

— Laura Mullen

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris…

— William Kennedy

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first…

— Carlos Ruiz Zafon

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited…

— Geraldine Brooks

“When we talk about books…we are talking about our approximate recollections of books… What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes…

— Pierre Bayard

Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs…

— Diane Setterfield

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

— Brian K. Vaughan

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from…

— Thomas Mallon

How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily…

— Jill Talbot

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

— Stephen King

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

— George Eliot

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being…

— Dani Shapiro