Juan Felipe Herrera Quotes

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

I am a writer of fragments.

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

It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

I've always been an entertainer all my life; I come from a family of entertainers. I always made, very pretentiously, a comparison with Agatha Christie. Her inspiration was crime, and I'm sure she must have taken courses or read about crime, because it was the basis of her stories. But ultimately, it was her own fantasy.

I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction.

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

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

I think my books come out very visual, which is an obvious consequence.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.