I say: William Faulkner.
Printable View
I say: William Faulkner.
Eleazar Famorcan in Health and Home and Christopher Marlowe because of Dr. Faustus...
Dostoyevsky consistently leads me into contemplation of self, society' rules and intrapersonal politics. I love reading this guy.
Evelyn Waugh is my personal favourite. I am in love with his beautiful, exquisite prose (he is also funnier than PG Wodehouse).
After Waugh comes Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Robert Graves, P G Wodehouse.
As for poetry, my personal favourite is Philip Larkin.
I cannot really pick *a* favorite, but for branding the American novel as an equal to the European: Melville, and as the penultimate bridge fusing this at the end of the 19th century, James; of the high modernists, tough but I have to cede to Proust, despite my affection for the Italians, and of the late 20th century, Lessing, Byatt, Gardner.
Fyodor Dostoevsky towers slightly above George Orwell for me. His writing style is freelance genius and the works I have read from him thus far are markedly impressive. The Idiot is probably the most complex novel I've ever read. Its remarkably difficult for me to fully grasp the implications of that novel...
I'd have to go with Camus being my personal favorite followed by Dostoevsky. Currently I'm finishing Swann's Way by Proust, and although at first his prose style was "different" to what I would normally read, I've grown to like him enough to add him to the list.
Orhan Pamuk
This will sound strange but probably William Godwin. Especially FLEETWOOD.
Couple of guys come to mind:
David Foster Wallace
William S Burroughs
Aldous Huxley
Don DeLillo
Dostoyevsky and Vonnegut
Probably I would have to say Kerouac, as his novels have so much feeling in them, and he had a good appreciation for beauty and was a very sensitive writer.
My favorite writer – and he never wrote and only spoke and who surpassed all and rose to a height few could. That is Osho and I am untiringly reading his discourses and each of them is stirring. He is an ocean of inspiration. If you read a particular writer you will read only one aspect of life but when you read Osho you will read a multiple discipline at the same time. He is a timeless person, a mystic. He has no match in this world
James Joyce and Dostoevsky, definitely.
That's a tough question to answer; I tend to find a point or idea of value in everything I read. In the majority of literary works, one may find one philosophically or morally important or striking sentence/idea after wading through fifty pages of stories - with different qualities or impact levels. My criteria for a writer who is particularly important to me is one who I find elements of the truth on each page, and this is very rare.
Novelists who fit this criteria include Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Chekhov (though maybe to a lesser extent than the others) Edgar Allan Poe, and Goethe. Philosophers would include, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Having said that, based on my rather loose criteria, poets tend to be much more direct, due to them (usually) having less words with which to get across their point. Poe would also be included in this, however poets such as Rimbaud, Coleridge and Pushkin (also for his short stories) are particularly important to me.
I used to read much more fiction than I do now, as most of my time spent on the humanities involves the reading of pure philosophical work, however those are the writers who have contributed most to the development of my own personal philosophy.