Literary Elements Quotes

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list.

A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.

When I first started writing, I wrote a book called 'Bruiser,' and it was pretty much set in Chicago.

I love poetry - just to read it and be around it.

The tree or the road - the ones I know of, finally they are the only characters I know really. The human characters I don't know. So there is both something I know and something I don't know. And I put them together.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

I like short stories.

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.

The words of the world want to make sentences.