Ruskin Bond Quotes

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

The important thing is to do good work, no matter what medium you do it in.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

The quality of your work, in the long run, is the deciding factor on how much your services are valued by the world.

If you're going to clutter up the world with more novels, you should do a little more than entertain people.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

The eternal task of song can never be finished in a single lifetime. That is the beauty and fascination of the art. Once you begin to phrase finely, you will feel more joy in the beautiful finish of a beautiful phrase than that caused by the loudest applause of an immense audience. The latter excites for a moment; the former endures forever.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets as Raphael painted pictures, sweep streets as Michelangelo carved marble, sweep streets as Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

Those who say only artists and architects can create are the ones who are elitist.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

I feel like the world is dominated by such a small group of human beings. There are so many different kinds of people that aren't represented, that don't have characters who look like them. And that's one of the reasons why I intend on being a director, because I want to actually tell some of these stories. I also think that we place such intense emphasis on award shows when they're not necessarily the best reflection of how good the work is. We need to realize that art and creation are so much bigger than an award or any measure of accomplishment.

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

Working with Jim Sheridan for instance, we did this movie Brothers. Jim will ask anybody - we'll get a delivery on set, and like the poor delivery guy will be like, "Here's your pizza," and he'll be like, "Come over here. Come here. I want to ask you a question. Do you think this is real? What do you think? Should we do another take?" And they're like, "I, uh, you want your pizza?" There's no shame in everybody's ideas. There's no shame in somebody not knowing.

It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank.

If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Michelangelo painted, as Beethoven composed, as Shakespear wrote.

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.