Quotes About Literature

Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.

In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.

This book that I just wrote is going to be coming out very soon to Australia.

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.

I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

My Brilliant Career was beautifully directed, but I had a bit of trouble with myself in it. It was a silly script, based on a book this 16-year-old girl wrote.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

One of the best things about my job is that I get to meet a lot of great children's and YA authors at events all over the country. So I figured it might be fun to interview some of them and turn the interviews into short online comics.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.

As a kid, I went from reading kids' books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college. However, my adult books are all science fiction, which has some similarities to YA.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.