Mary Gordon Quotes

Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

The stories that are out and the things that have been published are a sample of my interests. There are genres and sub-genres that I haven't waded into but have wanted to, or have waded into in other places but never actually written.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

If you're a writer, and you write fiction, that's not all you read.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

I've always loved to write, and I wrote fiction all my life. That's what I thought I was going to do in my life - until I started writing songs.

I stopped writing fiction the moment I started writing songs, and I miss it.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

Essentially, I'm a storyteller, and I make my living by telling stories, be they music or nonfiction or fiction.

I'm probably only going to make 10 movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to do after that. That's why I'm counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

I was reading fan fiction on Wattpad, but they were taking a little bit to update the stories, so I started writing my own stories to entertain myself. I didn't think anyone would read it.

If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.

My first love is literature.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

I used to write at home a lot. I used to write a bit for Girls Aloud.