Literary Skill Quotes

Generals who can write always make me nervous.

Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.

I don't think I'm a particularly good writer, and I'm not terribly insightful.

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

I'm not a writer. I haven't written anything.

Michael Koryta isn’t just one of the finest authors working in the crime genre today. He’s simply one of today’s finest authors, period. His stories are taut, compelling, and beautifully rendered. His understanding of human nature-the good, the evil, and all the gray between-is masterful. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is Koryta at his best.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.

Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history. I was captivated by her memorable characters and the perfectly paced revelations of their surprising relationships.

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.

I'm not a very creative person, you know? I'm not really an art person. I'm not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren't.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

Of course, Jack Kilborn is better than both of us combined and mixed with a side helping of the Bronte sisters.

The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.