Nathanael West
Author: cwq
“Facts can be turned into art if one is artful enough.”
Paul Simon
“You do have a leash, as a writer. You’re holding a dog. The great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That’s the excitement of writing plays.”
Harold Pinter
“Writing is something I know little about; less at some times than at others. I think, though, that so far as it is poetry it is a matter of correspondences: one glimpses them, pieces of an order, or thinks one does, and tries to convey the sense of what one has seen to those to whom it may matter, including, if possible, one’s self.”
“I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”
“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”
Sir Francis Bacon
“A novelist is someone who has volunteered to be a representative of literature and move it forward a generation. That is all.”
Jane Smiley
“I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top.”
William Faulkner