I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with...

'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

While designed to visually seduce, Dune is not primarily a formal exercise but a social, ecological, cultural one.

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an...

'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

I've waited for a novel from Charles Yu with eager anticipation since being bowled over by his 2006 short story collection, 'Third Class Superhero.'

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading 'proper' books, too.

Ireland starts for me with the end of 'The Dead,' which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.

In all my novels, I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today.

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different...

I don't write about love because it makes for easy, passive heroes. I write about how love makes my characters more autonomous, more self-possessed, more opinionated and powerful. I write about...

I'm more into graphic novels than comic books.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they...

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American...

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this...

Why do we write novels or make television about real things? It's the human condition and human suffering.

When I was a kid, I liked books that just seemed so dense you could lose yourself in them for a whole afternoon. They were like their own whole world.

Fairy tales to me are never happy, sweet stories. They're moral stories about overcoming the dark side and the bad.

I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.

The Hunger Games' is for eighth-grade girls! Winners read 'The Art of War!'

One of the reasons I'm reluctant to start a novel is it's such an obsessive activity. You get in there, you don't know anything else while you're in there. And that's quite a sacrifice to make,...

I'm interested in characters that are complex people.