John Berger Quotes

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

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

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

I started writing stories in my spare time.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

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.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

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

I like to play with tropes.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.