Literary Struggle Quotes

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.

I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.

To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after.

I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn't give up. Stubborn, maybe.

Writing a book is the most difficult, anxiety-prone aspect of my life because the words that I put on paper are very serious to me.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha!

I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

We wasted a lot of creative energy in that immediate post colonial era, when there was a struggle between, you know, the Cold War between the capitalism and communism. Many writers just wasted their energy and their talent because they want to be ideologically correct and of course all they produced was propaganda.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.