... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
I have an excellent memory - for books and authors, that is. I remember all the books I've read.
I love Tennessee Williams; as a playwright, he's so poetic.
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables.
All of our lives are enriched by our culture, from blockbuster films, best-selling video games, independent music, and internationally-renowned museums and art collections, to theatre, opera, ballet, literary festivals and performance poetry.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.
France is very welcoming to foreign writers.
I consider time as an in immense ocean, in which many noble authors are entirely swallowed up.
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.
The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.
Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare.
Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
Boswell is the first of biographers.
Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keeps souls, The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enrols.
I have represented people in book deals.
Deal with him, Hemingway!
Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.
Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency-a chaos-, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers
If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.
When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.
