John Skipper Quotes

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.

I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

I'm never going to be Tolstoy.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

All my big heroes are literary, writers.

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.

Celeste Ng is such a gifted writer.

In political life, dissatisfaction is remedied, or at least combated, through action. For as long as you are not totally satisfied, you remain active and keep going. In literary life, at some point you have to stop and allow others to read what you have written. I find that difficult. I am probably too proud. In any case, that is why I have never published anything. But I do plan to do so one day.

I'm a big believer that sci-fi lives in literature, that the true sci-fi population is out there reading a gazillion authors.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

I never set out to be a published writer.

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

You don't sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag's editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't admire Susan's own fiction.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.