top of page
"My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Writing quotes

"Writing. Is it a way to be remembered,or a need to become immortal?"

"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."

"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."

"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."

"Scotland consistently produces world-class writers."

"Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years."

"When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person."

"Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone."
Explore more quotes by Philip Levine

"Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice."

"Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home."

"I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves."

"My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote."

"No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you."
bottom of page