George Steiner Quotes

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

I completely take on the risk, the poker game, which being an artist means, and I'm going to try to make a film which honestly reflects what I have in my head.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

Reading 'Youth in Revolt' might have ruined my career because suddenly I wanted to abandon all the emotional truth of something and just go out far on a literary limb with completely implausible things that relied completely on voice and humor. And what saved me is realizing that I couldn't do that very well.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

I have an obligation as a writer to tell a story as interestingly as possible, but with integrity and not inserting false drama... I'm looking to be subtle, but being a wordsmith does not interest me - I want to communicate.

The thing about good writing is it has a music to it.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

A lot of the time, I read something I've written, and I think, 'Well, that's competent. It's not exactly breaking any boundaries. It's not exactly transgressive. It's just a bunch of fake people in a room talking to each other. But maybe there's a value to that.'

Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.

There are so many avenues to explore and stories to tell. It's just about finding new ways of telling them.

When I write, I feel like an optometrist, constantly flipping between lenses and asking, 'Is this better? Is this?' Slowly, the work comes into focus.

To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.

My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?

I used to spend a lot of time dreaming and writing poetry.