Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

I'm not sure there are too many people who write what I write.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

I wish I could think of a suitable name for the kind of writing I do.

I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.

When you are a writer, the assist-to-turnover ratio... there are a lot more turnovers than assists.

I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'