Sheila Heti Quotes

Alan Moore's writing is almost novelistic. It's very intricate and wordy and smart.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

Levi is one of the best authors I've ever read. It's hard not to have an immediate personal response to his work. He has such a quiet tone.

In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights.

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.

What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.

I'm rereading Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation.' I love it, and she's just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it's mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

Alice Walker's words have such rhythm and scream music.

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare.

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

As long as movies are depressing, life isn't.