The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
I've got to believe I'm the first person to win the Newbery who has written a Harlequin romance!
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Contrast is the dramatist's method.
When 'Romeo and Juliet' came along, I fell in love with the way that it was written and how innocent and vulnerable it was and how different it was from 'True Grit.' I really liked that.
Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.
The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'
The worse the passage the more welcome the port.
'Merry Wives of Windsor' is a wonderful machine. It's one of the great farces, and it's astonishing to remember that this is written by the same man who wrote 'Hamlet,' 'The Taming of the Shrew' or 'Cymbeline.' It's so similar, and yet the form is so different.
Close thy Byron ; open thy Goethe .
It's possible there are no two books in publishing history more dissimilar than 'Human Traces' and 'Devil May Care.' And that was really the attraction of it.
I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.
When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.
One of my favorite authors is Robert Cormier. He was a devout Catholic and a very nice man, which might not be the impression you get from reading his books.
There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.
In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.
