Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights into the literary world. Reading about the love letters novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his wife Vera blew my mind. Fascinating.
I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.
We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.
I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.
Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.
The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
It's true that your environment influences how you write.
Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light.
Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)
It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics.
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.
You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.
It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques.
I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things then. Also, I suspect, more accurate.
When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
It's very rare that a character comes to mind complete in himself. He needs additional traits that I often pick from actual people. One way you can cover your tracks is to change the sex.
