Alistair MacLeod Quotes

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,--they are better critics than authors.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. I had a discourse, an encounter with these people but I never had a list of questions.

Very nice couplet, although there are dull stretches.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as "task" or "role" when they are attached to literature.

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.

That complete statement which is literature.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.