John Barton Quotes

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

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.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.

With any book, I try to find where the manner of the making of the book is appropriate to the matter of the subject.

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.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

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.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

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.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.

When you're writing something to direct, you just write exactly what you're going to do. You don't have to write it in a way for other people to understand or interpret.