Thomas Hardy Quotes

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable.

I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation.

I've always wanted to be a songwriter and a storyteller and somebody who conveys a feeling to the listener or the viewer.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I wouldn't be making films if I just wanted to express some specific ideas; then I would be writing essays or something.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

I would spend my time telling stories or writing them.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.

I always give my students exercises where they really have to open a vein and bleed all over the paper and that's the way you get the important characters. Sooner or later every writer worth reading writes a story his mother wouldn't read and having to get that stuff out is part of one's growth as a writer.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.