Literary Potential Quotes

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everybody speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.

Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite.

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

I feel I've got 10 books in me.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

I got brilliant stories from people who'd never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who'd published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.

I think what happens is that we're so busy as pastors that we never get around to trying to turn that material into a book. It's a shame because there is so much good material out there that needs to be published.

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it.