Artistic Writing Quotes

I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.

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

Nothing feels better than constructing a beautiful sentence.

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.

My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book.

There's nothing mathematical to my writing. It's a feeling.

By embracing a label such as 'non-fiction,' the creative writing community has signaled to the world that what goes on in this genre is at best utilitarian and at worst an utter mystery. We have segregated the genre from art.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

I've been writing articles for newspapers and magazines. And writing is a very beautiful way of expression.

There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they're not writers - they're typists.

I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.

When I write, I want something to sound good itself.

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me - but the process of actually crafting it is essential.

For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.