Jenny Mollen Quotes

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

I can't rave enough about Eloisa James. I'm simply in awe of her talent.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.

Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.

You have to go where the good writing is.

I'm not saying it never occurred to me to want to write a masterpiece, but I really doubt I could.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

It feels amazing to work with writers that write really well.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

Sean's a great, great writer.

There are some incredibly gifted writers in the world. You can count them on a hand. They're blessed, and they've worked at their craft, but there's very few.

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.

I actually don't know much about Jaclyn Moriarty's process or where her stories come from or who inspired her characters. I just know that reading her books feels like sitting with friends. Her characters feel alive.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.

I am in that everything [ David Foster Wallace] writes is pretty much the best stuff I've read, so that makes me a fan I guess.

I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.

For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.

Although I did admire David Foster Wallace's final unfinished novel about boredom, I'm no DFW, and I want my books to be exciting, not boring.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.