Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

The temple of art is built in words.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.

Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

I talk in subjects and verbs, and sort of wind around in concentric circles until I get far enough away from the beginning so that I can call it the end, and it ends.

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

I think my books come out very visual, which is an obvious consequence.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves.

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.

The thing about good writing is it has a music to it.