Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

I'm only interested in poetry.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

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 was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.