A Quote by Amy Tan

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

Amy Tan

Quote Topics

Anybody Because Discouragement Encouragement Family Fiction Knew Literary Meant My Family Reader Think

Quote Author

Amy Tan
American - Writer
Born: February 19, 1952

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

Robert Fitzgerald

Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.

Percival Everett

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.

Rosemary Clement-Moore

I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marilyn and I... our initial friendship began because we are both readers. I've gone to sleep almost every night of my life after having read in a novel for 30 or 40 minutes. I'm a great reader of fiction and much less so of non-fiction.

Irvin D. Yalom

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

Michael Moorcock

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Dennis Lehane

I'm an encourager at heart. I love to give words of encouragement and I love to receive words of encouragement. That's probably why words of discouragement affect me so deeply.

Lysa TerKeurst

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

Mohsin Hamid

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.

Neil Cross

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

Nnedi Okorafor

People hear my dad is involved in politics, and all of a sudden I went to private school and had a nanny. There's a misconception that my dad, that our family is some kind blue-blood family... If people knew my friends, talked to anybody I grew up with, knew anybody from my old neighborhood, they'd know that's really, really far from the truth.

Carlos Condit

I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.

Anthony Doerr

Who really benefits from discouragement? More often than not, encouragement is exactly what is needed.

Tony Dungy

Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on psychological realism. If you limit yourself to a certain kind of American literary fiction, it's easy to forget about the different kinds of books that are being written. You can forget to be ambitious, both as a reader and a writer.

Katie Kitamura

I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.