Anthony Doerr Quotes

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

It is the glory and merit of some men to write well and of others not to write at all.

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

Just because someone has stylistic limitations doesn't necessarily make them a worse writer.

I couldn't even pick up the newspaper without saying, 'This is a fine piece of writing. I wish to hell I could write like this.'

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.

Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.

On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years.

Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.

If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

Celeste Ng is such a gifted writer.

I'm a lousy writer, and it shows when I try to write poetry.