Gaston Bachelard Quotes

A book can be wonderful and powerful and accessible and artful all at the same time.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

With writing fiction, I'm either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I'm writing them.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

It draws you in and creates pictures, so what I do is almost like a talking story book.

If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

Rarely do I try to pull a creature out of life and make it a character.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

There's a powerful magic about being a writer that I still marvel at.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it.

Ilike ideas writers have that I might not have written. Writers are there for a reason... to write for me.