Roger Rosenblatt Quotes

I have to believe everything I write is brand new and I'm writing in this way about these people in a completely new situation for the very first time.

Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.

The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for.

Write what you know.

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

There are millions of people who think that romance isn't real writing. But the only person who can make you real, make your books real, is you.

You can only write your own vision.

A poet's first contract is with truth.

I don't see what's so good about being genuine. Clog dancing is genuine. Isn't being fake more of an achievement? At least it takes some inspiration. Like, sherbet dips, they're a special food. Think of all the additives and coloring and grinding that it takes to create a sherbet dip. But carrots? They're just out there, shrieking, "Hi, we're some carrots! Love us for it!" They never have to prove themselves.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

You want to create things as purely as possible without allowing the universe to interfere so much that it's manipulating it and making things unreal to you.

Creativity only resonates if you infuse real life into the work.

Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

I'm not big into images. I'm into reality.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

Possessing a healthy imagination is a necessary ingredient for creativity.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller more than someone who had something meaningful to say.