Justin Cartwright Quotes

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

Thriller novelists get asked - berated, sometimes - about whether their work glorifies bad behavior, even, exploits human tragedy for entertainment.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

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

'Pitchfork' said something like, 'Michael Imperioli wrote a book that sounds like Lou Reed fan fiction,' which maybe it is. It's fiction, and I'm a fan. But it's not about me, and it's not a Lou Reed book.

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

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

I wouldn't say even that I'm a broadly political person. But on occasion, I have felt that I have no choice but to paint something with a strong moral stance.

It's not my responsibility to write plays about the way the world should be.

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

I don't understand why people are going mad about the lyrics I write? Do they expect everyone to become Mirza Ghalib?

I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

If I am writing down something and it is my idea, my imagination, it won't be fact.

There's definitely been a focus on the literary aspects of my music, and I always get a little cringey because I don't feel like I'm particularly literary. There's a sort of academic label that's put on me that seems inaccurate.

Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?

At the end, we can embrace and love whatever we want of an author's work. But we also can't ignore a writer's express wish just because we don't happen to agree with it.

When I started creating my work for publication, I just assumed that the focus would be on the work itself and that there wouldn't be a lot of interest in who was creating the work.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

If the media spotlight affects my work or represses what I want to say in the future, then it is bad.

Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors.

There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.