Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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.

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

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

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 a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.

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

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

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I still try to make the "next" book my "best" book. I want to grip and move you in unexpected ways.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.

I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass.

Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.

It is apparent at first glance that in The Double there is more creative talent and depth of thought than in Poor Folk. But meanwhile the consensus of St. Petersburg readers is that this novel is intolerably long-winded and therefore terribly boring.