Robertson Davies Quotes

I like to be read. That's most of what any writer could want.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.

Everything I publish is for my readers.

I really write for people.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.

As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

The book may be garbage, but if it weighs in at a kilo or more, I stand before its author in awe.

Minor writers think style is all.

For me, being a writer, you want to communicate with people, but if your goal is that every person is going to love what you do, then you're always going to be disappointed.

I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.

In a world where audiences listen for attitudes rather than arguments or information, speakers must feel the pressure to posture rather than engage.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.

Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people, and sometimes it seems that I do so, but I would not write for no-one.

When you publish something, it is very much as if you pulled your pants down in public. If what you have written is good, nobody can hurt you; if what you have written is bad, nobody can help you.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.