ISMAIL KADARE
1998
“I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.” |
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GARRISON KEILLOR
1995
“Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.” |
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WILLIAM KENNEDY
1989
“You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.” |
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JACK KEROUAC
1968
I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing, speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings. |
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KEN KESEY
1994
On a true fool natural: “He never stops being a fool to save himself; he never tries to do anything but anger his master . . . Hunter Thompson is a fool natural. Neal Cassady was a fool natural, the best one we knew.” |
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STEPHEN KING
2006
“They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.” |
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CAROLYN KIZER
2000
On feminism: “It's a point of view; it's a stance; it's an attitude towards life that affects, and afflicts, everything I do.” |
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AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
2007
“I’ve always felt that there’s a very thin membrane between madness, alcoholism, and/or destitution and being an OK American guy in a comfortable heated apartment with meatballs and a decent Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge.” |
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ARTHUR KOESTLER
1984
“I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.” |
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JERZY KOSINSKI
1972
“[Nabokov’s] language is made visible . . . like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind.” |
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MILAN KUNDERA
1984
“The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious—think of Cervantes!” |
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STANLEY KUNITZ
1982
“One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don’t know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.” |
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PHILIP LARKIN
1982
“A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.” |
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JAMES LAUGHLIN
1983
“[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.” |
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JAMES LAUGHLIN
1983
On his father: “If I asked him for money, he'd say, ‘Are you going to publish some more of those books that I can't understand?’ And I'd say, ‘Yes.’ And he'd give it to me.” |
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JOHN LE CARRE
1997
“The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.” |
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FRAN LEBOWITZ
1993
“I wouldn’t say that I dislike the young. I’m simply not a fan of naïveté.” |
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ROSAMOND LEHMANN
1985
“The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes . . . Nowadays, there are too many books and not enough good ones.” |
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DORIS LESSING
1988
“[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling—is like an encounter group . . . ” |
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JONATHAN LETHEM
2003
“I’m gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.” |
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PETER LEVI
1979
“. . . whoever you are, you've got to start from where you are. If you're a sailor, and only know sailor's language, well, write in it, for God's sake.” |
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PRIMO LEVI
1995
“I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first.” |
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PHILIP LEVINE
1988
On having his testimony discounted in court: “How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can't present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is, Stay out of court.” |
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MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
1990
Quoting Neruda: “I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding. . . . If you become famous, you will have to go through that.” |
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CHRISTOPHER LOGUE
1993
On American English: “It seems to me that the contrast between adjacent syllables has lessened and the result is an over-reliance on enjambment. Now enjambment is a fine, intellectually strong aid, but like all such things it becomes tiresome and calls too much attention to itself.” |
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ROBERT LOWELL
1961
“Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.” |
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ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
1974
“. . . The Greeks regarded what we call ‘public’ experience as part of human experience. This is what gives such ground and scope and humanity to Greek poetry at its greatest.” |
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NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
1992
“Sufism . . . it gives relief in the midst of battle . . . ” |
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DEREK MAHON
2000
“Raymond Chandler [has said]: ‘No art without the resistance of the medium.’ But the resistance mustn't be gratuitously imported for tactical purposes.” |
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NORMAN MAILER
1964
On the idea of the novelist as God: “God can write in the third person only so long as He understands His world. But if the world becomes contradictory or incomprehensible to Him, then God begins to grow concerned with His own nature.” |
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NORMAN MAILER
2007
“As you grow older, there’s no reason why you can’t be wiser as a novelist than you ever were before. You should know more about human nature every year of your life.” |
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BERNARD MALAMUD
1975
“Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.” |
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DAVID MAMET
1997
On his play Bobby Gould in Hell: “The Devil says [to Bobby], ‘Nothing's black and white; nothing's black and white—what about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb fuck!’” |
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JAVIER MARIAS
2006
“To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long.” |
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HARRY MATHEWS
2007
“I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It’s a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.” |
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PETER MATTHIESSEN
1999
“[The zoologist George Schaller and I] had walked away from civilization through mythic mountains and ancient villages in clear October light—but what a pity to say that to each other!” |
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FRANCOIS MAURIAC
1953
“Sartre expressed the despair of this generation. He did not create it, but he gave it a justification and a style.” |
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WILLIAM MAXWELL
1982
“My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.” |
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MARY MCCARTHY
1962
“[Point of view is] the problem that everybody's been up against since Joyce, if not before. . . . I think this technical development has become absolutely killing to the novel.” |
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J. D. MCCLATCHY
2002
“Lowell, who was the most exhaustingly literary person I’d ever met, I’ve always considered the master of rhetoric. He told me once that he worked over a line ‘until it sounds like Lowell.’” |
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DAVID MCCULLOUGH
1999
“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what's been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.” |
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IAN MCEWAN
2002
“Moments of crisis [in my writing] were to become a way of exploring and testing character. How we might withstand, or fail to withstand, an extreme experience . . . ” |
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THOMAS MCGUANE
1985
“You either make a little nation and solve its historical and personnel problems within the format of your own household . . . and you win that one, or you lose the only war worth fighting.” |
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WILLIAM MEREDITH
1985
“In the navy, when we were flying, instead of saying, ‘Take care of yourself,’ people would say, ‘Don't crash and burn.’ I don't know how funny it was, but we thought it was hilarious.” |
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JAMES MERRILL
1982
“I like . . . those pockets of genuine strangeness within nations. Yet those are being emptied, turned inside out, made to conform—in the interest of what?” |
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W. S. MERWIN
1987
“[As a child] I was so fascinated by these watercolors in a book about Indians that I began teaching myself to read the captions . . . So I associate learning to read English . . . with wanting to know about Indians. I'm still growing into it.” |
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LEONARD MICHAELS
2008
“Some of the one-paragraph stories I wrote before the novel took weeks of revision. I’d go mad with concern over semicolons. Conjunctions ruined my sleep.” |
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ARTHUR MILLER
1999
On his writing process:
“Occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.” |
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ARTHUR MILLER
1966
“In the Greek audience, fourteen thousand people sat down at the same time, to see a play . . . And nobody can tell me that those people were all readers of the New York Review of Books!” |
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HENRY MILLER
1962
“I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. In other words, obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.” |
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CZESLAW MILOSZ
1994
“A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that's it.” |
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RICK MOODY
2001
“It’s important for me to have someone read the work who won’t let me get away with things. A bullshit detector. Essential to the process.” |
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LORRIE MOORE
2001
“A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.” |
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MARIANNE MOORE
1961
“I think the most difficult thing for me [in my writing] is to be satisfactorily lucid, yet have enough implication in it to suit myself.” |
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ALBERTO MORAVIA
1954
“A writer survives in spite of his beliefs. Lawrence will be read whatever one thinks of his notions on sex. Dante is read in the Soviet Union.” |
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JAN MORRIS
1997
“[Imperialism] allowed people to break away from shackling old traditions and heritages. It introduced the world to fresh ideas and new opportunities. These are the contributions that matter for the redemption and the unity of us all.” |
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WRIGHT MORRIS
1991
“My guess would be that our folly lies not in what threatens us, or even what eludes us, but in our inability to adapt to it.” |
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TONI MORRISON
1993
On female friendships:
“Hating, fighting one another, and joining men in their condemnation of ourselves [is] a typical example of what dominated people do.” |
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JOHN MORTIMER
1988
“Nothing equips you more for a life in letters than a career in the divorce court.” |
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PAUL MULDOON
2004
“I’m pretty interested in general knowledge, and science and arcane knowledge. Much more interested in that than I am in Literature with a capital L. Or at least as interested.” |
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ALICE MUNRO
1994
“You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.” |
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HARUKI MURAKAMI
2004
“Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoyevsky and Chandler together in one book.” |
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IRIS MURDOCH
1990
“Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas good characters are dull and always the same. This certainly indicates a literary problem.” |
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LES MURRAY
2005
“It’s a deep dirty secret, in Australia, that I’m the wrong class to be a poet.” |
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV
1967
"I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the air of the western states, are my links with Asiatic and Arctic Russia." |
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V. S. NAIPAUL
1998
“Something in late life I have come to understand [is the connection between] hysteria and the sense of the absurd.” |
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PABLO NERUDA
1971
“My house has been burned; I have been detained more than once; I have been exiled; they have declared me incommunicado . . . Very well then. I'm not comfortable with what I have.” |
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PATRICK O'BRIAN
1995
“The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays from a new, strenuous, unpleasant school and finding
oneself back in wholly familiar surroundings. . . .” |
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EDNA O'BRIEN
1984
On art and masochism: “I was reading van Gogh's letters. My God! I'm surprised he cut off only one ear, that he wasn't altogether shredded in pieces!” |
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FRANK O'CONNOR
1957
“I still maintain that living with somebody . . . you know him as well as he can be known . . . What happens if you're torturing him or he's dying of cancer is no business of mine and that is not the individual.” |
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JOYCE CAROL OATES
1978
“I have beliefs, of course, like everyone—but I don't always believe in them.” |
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KENZABURO OE
2007
“I’ve cultivated the first-person style as opposed to the third person. It’s a problem. A really good novelist is able to write in the third person, but I have never been able to write well in the third person.” |
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CHARLES OLSON
1970
“I've been very lucky, very lucky. I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.” |
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AMOS OZ
1996
“You know, if you write in a troubled part of the world, everything is interpreted allegorically. If I wrote a story about a mother, a father, and their daughter, a critic would say that the father represents the government, the mother, the old values, and the daughter the shattered economy!” |
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CYNTHIA OZICK
1987
“To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.” |
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