Lisa Scottoline Quotes

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

I read 'The First Bad Man' by Miranda July, and I just thought, 'Oh my God, I'll never be this good. That book is so incredible.'

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

I'm personally attracted to great writing - that's what turns me on the most.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.

Good writers are of necessity rare.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.

I don't think anything you've written is immortal as yet.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.