Literature Quotes - Page 4

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Words are a puzzle; put them together the right way and you get something beautiful.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.