Steve Martin Quotes

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.

I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

I love reading almost as much as I love writing.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.

When I read interviews with people like Kevin Barry or Colin Barrett, who I hugely admire, they don't really seem to come up against the question of likeability even though their characters, in some instances, are really horrible.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease & intimacy with the process of writing... It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

I never write. Never! I do not even remember if I can write … This is a true freestyle in general. I put a beat, I said some stuff, I retain ideas, I do it again, with a particular intonation, I test, and especially I record live.