Literary Aspiration Quotes

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.

I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.

I've just started to get really envious when I go into people's houses and see books on a shelf.

I wanted to be Langston Hughes.

Sloane Crosley and David Sedaris are two of my favorite writers; they're the kind of writers who make you feel like, 'I can do this. I want to do this.'

The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.

I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.

War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.

I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.

I always ask young writers, 'Are you certain you want to be a writer? If you're absolutely sure, then do it.' If you really want to write, writing has to take precedence over everything else, except for taking care of your loved ones. It has to be more important than any possession, more important than fame. We hear about just a few writers who get famous, but most of them don't. It's got to mean more than that.

I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.

All I'd ever wanted to do in my life was write and publish books, and woe to anyone who stood in my way.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

You want to write something as good as what you've read.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

Ultimately, I would love to do 'The Emperor of Ocean Park' by Stephen Carter.

Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions.

I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

I wanted to be a novelist for so long.

When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.