Karl Kraus Quotes

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I've always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

When I was 14 years old, I was crazy about Dr. Seuss. I loved the words he made up, and I just thought, 'Well, if he can make up words, then I can make up words.'

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

I love playing with words and texture.

First and foremost, I'm an oral storyteller - I'll make a poetic choice over a grammatical choice every single time.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.