John Morley Quotes

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

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Cheap little rhymes A cheap little tune Are sometimes as dangerous As a sliver of the moon.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

Creating fantasy is a very personal thing, but you can't take the process too personally.

I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there's a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it.

What I'm trying to do is to write a story. If you take something from it, that's wonderful; if you don't, that's wonderful as well.

I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Most of all, I love being a storyteller. And yes, I want to make a good living, but I'm not always driven by the best commercial sense.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

My job is to put words together and tell a story. If that doesn't work for you, it's not a war crime.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

Success is sweet and treacherous.

Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing, it's infinity that is limiting and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

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

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