I remember coming upon Philip Larkin in my 20s in the early '60s and when Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" came out it knocked me off my feet.
Louise Gluck, C.K. Williams, Thomas Lux. A lot of the poets that I like are the ones that influenced me as a writer.
I had a period when I read Nobel Prize winners. I figured they had to be good. I discovered some people I didn't know about, like the Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness, who wrote "Independent People." .
I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.
There's a Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. He was a very crotchety, strange man, but his poems are wonderful. He was nominated for the Nobel in the 1990s but never won.
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.
I'm reading "The Sunset of a Splendid Century" by W.H. Lewis. He was C.S. Lewis's brother. He wrote two books about the French court of Louis XIV that are incredibly detailed. They are books that on every page you say, "Wow, think of that."
I think I made a mistake with [Jane] Austen by reading all six in a row. There are similarities to the plots so by the time I got to the last one I could anticipate what was happening too easily. But her characterizations are amazing.
Other than fiction and poetry I tend to read history.
I had not read George Eliot, so read a few. I felt ashamed I hadn't read "Middlemarch" before.
I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.
I never read Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." I've been reading books that I should have read years ago and did not. That's one of them.
Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: