Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Quotes

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

There's a powerful magic about being a writer that I still marvel at.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

I love writing shorter fiction.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

Writing is really hard, and it's really a skill.

I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better, I would love to be a writer.

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.