Robert Frost Quotes

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.