"Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort."

Art, Literature, Effort, Reading

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"Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort."

Exlpore more Art quotes

"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Art, Beauty, Creation, Inspiration, Aesthetic

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

Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

Art, Poetry, Humor, Accuracy, Creativity

"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."

Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

Art, Storytelling, Life, Reality, Truth

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

Abhijit Naskar, Indian Author

Art, Inspirational, Power, Truth, Wisdom

"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."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

Art, Poetry, Time, Music, Writing

"Music gives life to the soul."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Art, Music, Life, Soul, Energy

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

John Geddes, Canadian Author

Art, Writing, Life, Presence, Creativity

"Music gives strength to the soul."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Art, Music, Strength, Soul, Power

"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."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Art, Poetry, Emotion, Imagination, Communication

"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."

Michael Bassey Johnson, Nigerian Philosopher

Art, Writing, Creativity, Story

Explore more quotes by Jeanette Winterson

"I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex."

Family, Rules, Rebellion, Youth, Identity

"The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it's the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world."

Love, Heart, Sex, Emotion

"I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion."

Character, Confusion

"Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself."

Life,

"However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience."

Love, Experience, Focus

"The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct."

Time, Work, Interest

"We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then."

Will,

"You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?"

Time, Heart

"One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life."

Life, People

"I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle."

Truth, Homosexuality