Great Throughts Treasury

"Writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!"

"You can't make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts."

"Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories."

"Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form ? writing and structure ? elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad."

"You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be."