James Howard Kunstler Quotes

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

There's always a bit of fiction in everything that I write.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You are creating a reality but it's a different sort of performance.

I've really come into my own as an artist. I'm much more sure of my identity and understand it much better, and have accepted the fact that I like to jump around a lot in terms of who I am and what kind of music I create, and that it is okay - in fact, that is my main identity, the fact that I do that.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

I'm not an intellectual, I'm just a writer.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.