H. G. Bissinger Quotes

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.

I think, in reading a few sentences of text, you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers but in lyricists as well.

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, 'I can't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.

When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.

At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.