Courtney Ryley Cooper: None from current authors. A lot from the classics, all devoured by the time I was sixteen. I had read everything from Dickens to Gautier by that time.
Arthur Crabb: I think I have learned very little from reading current authors, if you mean by current authors the average writer for the popular magazines. I used to read a great many stories, but of late years have practically stopped doing it. I have read and am reading constantly classics, if by that you mean great books written in the last three or four hundred years. I think that one of the reasons I am not more successful is that I try to write, as I see it, along the lines of the great novelists and haven't the goods. If I aimed at a less pretentious mark I would probably do a great deal better.
Mary Stewart Cutting: I have read everything classic and current that I could lay my hands on from the age of six.
Elmer Davis: Haven't learned it.
William Harper Dean: My work is influenced greatly from reading current authors. Little through the classics, unless you include Dickens among the latter. From him I have absorbed an invaluable conception of what the true meaning of atmosphere is, the weight of the short sentence and the power of the long one. But I am inspired in many ways when I read Hall Caine or Hutchinson or Hamsun or Conrad. I aspire to the easy, forceful style of Hutchinson, I want to be able to handle my characters with that charming grace which characterizes Conrad.
Harris Dickson: I read spasmodically current fiction, browse among the classics and naturally pick up ideas. These pick-ups are not, as a rule, conscious. Things just soak in, as water soaks into the ground and a spring comes out somewhere else.
Captain Dingle: Impossible for me to say. If I have learned from anybody it has been unconsciously. Had I taken a master, I suspect I might have got farther.
Louis Dodge: I get enthusiasm from reading current authors and the classics; but I try to find my own stories among people and tell them in my own way. To me a good book is like a preacher (the "ungracious pastor" of Shakespeare): it says to me "be good"—but it doesn't show me how.
J. Allan Dunn: I don't know. Don't believe much until I had myself acquired a certain amount of technique and could recognize the cleverness of others.
Phyllis Duganne: I've learned a great deal from reading current authors. It's interesting to read a story and like it, and then pick it to pieces to see how its writer made me feel as he did, how he made scenes so vivid and people so real, how he took an ancient plot and made it worth reading even when I knew after the first paragraph what the end would be. And it's instructive. And I suppose the same thing holds more or less in the classics. I'm much more interested in the modern school, so far as my own work is concerned.