Literary Artistry Quotes

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.

The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

Writing is my favorite part of the job.

I'm a writer more than I am a talker.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

I've always had the ability to manipulate words and communicate ideas and thoughts.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency.

You can have faith in writing itself. That's where to place your faith, in the same way that a pole vaulter places his faith in the laws of physics. He will go up in direct proportion to the strength with which he pushed off, and he will come down every time.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.