Ruskin Bond Quotes

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.

I ain't no author, man... my writing skills are not of 'New York Times' best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

I am a writer of fragments.

Your ability to name every single variation of Kryptonite and every first issue in which it appears is a great pop quiz skill, but is not a great writing skill, all right? So just because you can do that doesn't mean you know how to write.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register. It's the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.

I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it... I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.