Herta Muller Quotes

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

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.

If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.

If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.

I wanted to write a story that demanded the viewer's attention.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

Even now I try to make each page compelling for the readers to get absorbed in the book.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

My favorite writers have been those who've said things well.

I like when you are telling a story and fall into an impression.

Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.'

If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers.

I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.

Anything I've ever read by John Irving has been really well written.

The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

When you pick up a script and you can't stop reading it because it's a real page-turner, that's a good sign.

Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.