Literary Mastery Quotes

I have always felt a special affinity with V. S. Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his work is unified by a great generosity of spirit.

In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.

... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.

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

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.

There's only one common element that united every writer I've admired... they're all incredibly well-read.

The prose of Joe Pulver can take its place with that of the masters of our genre – E.A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti – while his imaginative reach is something uniquely his own.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well'? Can he, indeed? ... Can you, sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.