Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.

I have four shelves covered with journals that I've written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I've probably written 100 songs.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

My mom bought me an 'Anne of Green Gables' journal. And I just remember thinking it was so cool, and I could write anything in it.

There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

My best writing has always been in journals.

A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.

I don't believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.

It is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing is particularly female. Nature might have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.

Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

The novel remains a very special form for me.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

I assumed just from being around, all these years, that people would immediately glom on to, Well, it's a departure, and it's a dystopian kind of thing, and that's natural, of course. But it's surprised me - not even surprised me, but it's pleased me - how much people have been responding to the way the book was written.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.