Literary Form Quotes

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I have great faith in the future of books - no matter what form they may take - and of science fiction.

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

I turned to the novel, an artistic form which had in former days been neglected and had thus acquired a bad reputation, but which during the nineteenth century had developed and elevated itself to the ranks occupied by drama and the ancient epic.

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.

POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.

Beware of clichés. Not just the ­clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought - even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ­clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.

The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.