Quotes About Literature

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.

It is difficult not to write satire.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.

It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

I've always measured a good day as one where I can read, write, and run.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.

I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.

Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.

My real name is Madeleine Wickham, under which I write dramas with an edge of humour. As Sophie Kinsella it's fast, all-out comedies, such as the 'Shopaholic' series.

I wanted a garret hideaway to write in like Jo March in 'Little Women.'

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.