William E. Gladstone Quotes

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.

It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

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

I'd like my writing to be recognized with a Grammy.

I associated excellence in writing with New York City.

There is no doubt that Michael Symmons Roberts is a very good poet - you don't win a Whitbread award and get shortlisted for a TS Eliot prize for nothing. Few poets, though, have ever been good novelists, and vice-versa.

The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it's the kind of thing that makes me feel like - even as it's been bestowed upon me - I must continue to live up to what it means... Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.

You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.

I don't think I'm any competition to the already-existing canon of writers in Kannada. How can I ever even think of comparing myself?