Louis B. Mayer Quotes

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

A book makes claims of literary art.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

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

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

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.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

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

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

With any book, I try to find where the manner of the making of the book is appropriate to the matter of the subject.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.