All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
Most writers write to say something about other people - and it doesn't last. Good writers write to find out about themselves - and it lasts forever.
The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!
Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
In 1970, somebody once asked me whether I thought my books would still be around in 40 years, and I thought, 'How would I know, and why would I care?' Well, it turns out I really do care.
I just started to put texting and phones in my books. I want my books to be read 20 years from now; I don't want them to be dated.
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.
You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
I think every writer wants future generations to read what he has written.
I always think W.S. Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.
Hemingway always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.
I always loved to read, and I wanted to be part of the project of literature. My physical longevity is due to luck, and my literary longevity is due to my physical longevity.
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.
I love books that stand the test of time.
Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers. Children's books stay in print for decades.
