Robert Metcalfe Quotes

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

There's no literary merit in my books.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

That complete statement which is literature.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.

A book makes claims of literary art.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.