A Quote by Steve Toltz

Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

Steve Toltz

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Steve Toltz
Australian - Novelist
Born: 1972

There are authors like David Foster Wallace or Raymond Chandler - with voice-based authors I might end up a completist, because what I love about them isn't just the particular construction of one novel or another but their flavor. There is an Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, as well. One book is not necessarily greater than another book, but they just have this incredible, unique voice, so it doesn't really matter which one you read.

Steve Toltz

Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's how I discovered Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist whose novels tend to be one long rant.

Stephen Dobyns

I'm very similar to Chandler in many ways, although Chandler is funnier than me, and Chandler absolutely hates his job whereas I absolutely love my job.

Matthew Perry

My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.

Sue Grafton

My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.

Michael Connelly

If Raymond Chandler came from the South, his name would be Ace Atkins.

Kinky Friedman

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

Michael Connelly

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.

James Ellroy

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

James Ellroy

Like Hemingway and Faulkner, but in an entirely different mode, Fitzgerald had that singular quality without which a writer is not really a writer at all, and that is a voice, a distinct and identifiable voice. This is really not the same thing as a style; a style can be emulated, a voice cannot, and the witty, rueful, elegaic voice gives his work its bright authenticity.

William Styron

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

Megan Abbott

There are certain writers I can't read when I'm trying to write because their voices are so distinct. Cormac McCarthy, he's the most different writer from anything I've ever written, but there's something about those really spare sentences that is just tough - it would be too much of an influence. Grace Paley is my favorite writer. Her stuff is so voice-driven, when I read her a lot I want to make my writing more voice-y and dialogue-heavy. I love a lot of stuff in translation.

Molly Antopol

I really wouldn't call a lot of what's online "literature" since that word, to me, refers to a sub-genre of writing that belongs to the heavy-hitters, the canonical writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Borges, DFW, e.g.

Lee Klein

I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

Ben Marcus

With 'The Big Lebowski,' we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it's about L.A.

Ethan Coen

When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere.

Walter Kirn

A Quote by Steve Toltz

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