Айрис Мердок о любимых романах:

I re-read my favorite novels very much. I hope to forget them a little bit, so that one can't quite remember the plot. I re-read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Dickens very much, and Henry James, to some extent — I read certain books of Henry James. And Proust. And I read Wuthering Heights, and I read Jane Austen, and I read The Tale of Genji by Murasaki-I love that novel.
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I don't think I feel terribly drawn to any of them [books of contemporary authors], in the sense that I am drawn to and enslaved by Tolstoy and Company. I admire Tolkein's book, The Lord of the Rings, which many people take a rather superior attitude to
(To Wendy Lesser, 1984)

Connections? Absolutely none. I mean, I'd like to be influenced by Proust. I don't on the whole like French novels, except for Proust. I find Flaubert and Stendhal quite alien.The kinds of novels that I feel at home with and want to be like are the traditional English novels and the Russian novels. I'd very much like to resemble Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. I think a mixture of all three of them would be ideal. And I would certainly like to be influenced by Proust, but he is the only French writer that I feel akin to
(To S.B. Sagare, 1987)