Literature Quotes

"The novel is alive - it breathes."

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."

"There is an honorable tradition of lying in literature."

"There is a world of difference between the man who writes and the man who writes well."

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours."

"The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller."

"I'm a very serious writer."

"The novel is dead."

"The strength of literature is that it can literally make you feel less alone"

"There is no difference between poetry and prose when properly read"

"Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found."

"There are now more than a million books in existence. To read them all in a lifetime is impossible."

"And I think that is very good advice for writing, too: write about people."

"Books are made of dreams."

"I have become uncomfortable with the usual interpretations of what I have written."

"The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself."

"The purpose of writing is to inform and control reality."

"Words are like microscopes."

"The only good reason to write is to say something that hasn't been said before, or to say something old in a way that's never been heard."

"The function of the novelist is to illuminate the human condition, not to escape from it."

"To write about violence is to confront the truth of human nature."

"The writer's job is to invade the reader's consciousness and leave it changed."

"The novel is the highest form of human expression because it contains multitudes."

"Almost everything I have written is a sort of elegy to yet another phase of my own past."

"What really knocks me out is a book that makes the world stop for a moment so you can sit around and wonder about it."

"Sit down to write what's true"

"Junky is a good book because it is about junk, and junk is the ultimate American subject."

"A writer is a magician."

"The poem is a place."

"The measure of poetry is the measure of prose."