Michael Imperioli Quotes

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

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

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

If he makes out Pierce to be either a brave or a great man, then it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

There's no literary merit in my books.

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.

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see the - any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.

Attending a book group is always a salutary experience for a writer. There's no guarantee that the people there will have enjoyed your book, and, as anyone who has taken part in a book group will know, half the fun is in ripping a book you haven't liked to shreds.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

People don't understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer's feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like 'Panama' or 'Bullet Park.'

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.