Heinrich Boll Quotes

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

I enjoy the research and love actually creating the words. There's not too much I find a drudge when it comes to writing.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.