Geraldine Brooks Quotes

But everything of value about me is in my books.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.

One always likes one's latest book best. That's a natural feeling.

In a weak moment, I have written a book.

I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led.