top of page
"I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again, forever."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Art quotes

"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."

"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."

"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."

"Make movies my friend " make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul."

"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."

"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."

"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all."

"The life of a writer is directed by a mad impulsive muse, that can tell them to cancel all their storyline: a creative divergent devil."
Explore more quotes by John Irving

"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."

"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."

"No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him."

"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."

"If you care about something you have to protect it " If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."

"I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around."

"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."
bottom of page