Are there any great writers who never actually read much? Every

I wonder what Homer read?

>>8685737
probably dabbled with an oral-fable group.

>>8685737
interracial cuckolding erotica

>>8685737
Homer isn't a real person

>>8685732
this is retarded. please think about why and then delete this

No. But early 20's is not too early to start. There has never been an even decent writer who didn't read.

>>8685792
When its too late?

The best readers aren't necesarily the best writers, but the best writers are always the best readers among the writers who read. Borges, Joyce, Gass, Beckett and almost every single other major writer were all ridiculously well read.

>>8685858
Did you mean to ask, "When is it too late?" Probably five years before you die.

File: homer-simpson.jpg (33KB, 310x500px) Image search: [Google]

33KB, 310x500px

>>8685745

>>8685926
/thread

>>8685732
All the famous writers just pretended to read. No one actually reads

>>8685732

Don DeLillo read only comic books as a child, but when he was 18 he got right into the patrcian zone by getting into Faulkner and Joyce and stuff.

>>8685957
Not OP here, but care to provide any source to this?

>>8685966
>INTERVIEWER
>Did you read as a child?

>DeLILLO
>No, not at all. Comic books. This is probably why I don’t have a storytelling drive, a drive to follow a certain kind of narrative rhythm.

>INTERVIEWER
>As a teenager?

>DeLILLO
>Not much at first. Dracula when I was fourteen. A spider eats a fly, and a rat eats the spider, and a cat eats the rat, and a dog eats the cat, and maybe somebody eats the dog. Did I miss one level of devouring? And yes, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which showed me that my own life, or something like it, could be the subject of a writer’s scrutiny. This was an amazing thing to discover. Then, when I was eighteen, I got a summer job as a playground attendant—a parkie. And I was told to wear a white T-shirt and brown pants and brown shoes and a whistle around my neck—which they provided, the whistle. But I never acquired the rest of the outfit. I wore blue jeans and checkered shirts and kept the whistle in my pocket and just sat on a park bench disguised as an ordinary citizen. And this is where I read Faulkner, As I Lay Dying and Light in August. And got paid for it. And then James Joyce, and it was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history. And I’d look at a sentence in Ulysses or in Moby-Dick or in Hemingway—maybe I hadn’t gotten to Ulysses at that point, it was Portrait of the Artist—but certainly Hemingway and the water that was clear and swiftly moving and the way the troops went marching down the road and raised dust that powdered the leaves of the trees. All this in a playground in the Bronx.

i am gonna let /lit/izens in on a little truth

if you are thinking of it as "getting started" at reading, or it is something you are actively working towards, you are already defeated.

the successful (and many who would've been, if for different luck) are not those who forced themselves into it, or "got started" at a certain age.

success in this kind of field (writing popular novels as much as academia as much as many other fields) goes to the kind of people who dont know what else they would be doing, have never wanted to do anything else, and have only ever done this out of total impulse and personality, not because they "got started" one day

>>8685984
those "getting started" on this board are doing it as an identification mechanism, not because they are truly meant for it

>>8685732
Of course there are. There are some famous dyslexic writers. Writing is a creative craft, you can look at others prose only to enhance it and get out of your head.