Edward Hirsch Quotes

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.

People don't stress enough that when they're writing lyrics, they are writing.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

You become a great writer by writing.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

I write novels and other things.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

Writing is really hard, and it's really a skill.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.