Edward Hirsch Quotes

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

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

If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story.

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.