Literature Quotes

"What makes literature vital is its engagement with moral ambiguity."

"The writer must be willing to destroy beauty in the pursuit of truth."

"The novelist is a student of human nature, not human behavior."

"The novelist must learn to be comfortable with moral complexity."

"Language is the only tool we have to bridge the gap between inner and outer worlds."

"The novelist is a translator of internal experience into external language."

"Literature survives because it speaks to what is timeless in human experience."

"The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them believable."

"Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all."

"Every piece of fiction requires a degree of concentration and attention from the reader."

"The writer's business is to uncover and to interpret human experience."

"A writer is judged by the subjects he chooses and by what he has to say about them."

"The main concern of the fiction writer is not to convey information but to create experience."

"The Catholic novelist in the South should be entirely free to see his antagonism in terms of region."

"The novelist and the believer are separated when they approach the religious problem."

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring; there is nothing that doesn't require his attention."

"A person with the good writer's temperament is bound to offend."

"The writer must struggle to earn the reader's attention."

"The writer who cuts himself off from his roots will end up with nothing to say."

"The writer has to make the Word flesh without making the Word absurd."

"The grotesque has always inhabited the Southern character the way it inhabits the Southern landscape."

"The author does not argue or explain but acts; he conducts his reader through an experience."

"The difficulty of the modern writer is that he has no adequate framework within which to work."

"The business of the fiction writer is to imagine that action the way a reader would have to imagine it."

"The good writer is the one who can see what is there rather than what he thinks ought to be there."

"In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the story itself."

"The writer who would be good must get to know his own province."

"The most important thing is the pattern that the work makes in the mind of the reader."

"The writer has only one language to work with, and that is the language of his own time."

"A writer's task is to make concrete the things that people are only vaguely aware of."