What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your...

The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.

Maybe at the very bottom of it… I really don’t like God. You know, it’s silly to say I don’t like God because I don’t believe in God, but in the same sense that I...

Pay attention, and use your imagination.

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse...

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

In your hands winteris a book with cloud pagesthat snow pearls of love.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but moulds it to it’s purpose.

To keep the air fresh among words is the secret of verbal cleanliness.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful...

In employing the long sentence the inexperienced writer should not strain after the heavy, ponderous type. Johnson and Carlyle used such a type, but remember, an ordinary mortal cannot wield the sledge hammer of a...

Possible impossibility emerges From an impossible possibility, Or possibly, impossible possibility Blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility.

yo soy mi propio ángel y mi único demonio.

Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it’s not my genre.

The ambition of much of today’s literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.

Fly without wings; Dream with open eyes; See in darkness.

One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.

You are not what you are; You are darkness Looking for light within.

When I want to be reminded of stupidity, especially my own, I turn on the TV.

To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.

They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.

Sunbathe from within.

…there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes...

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually...

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy...

If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques...

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

The fairy tale belongs to the poor…I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.

Una mujer es como la buena literatura: al alcance de todos, pero incomprensible para los estúpidos.

With the windows in his top of the range Audi firmly in place we slowly baked ourselves and chatted over why my hatred of golf was wrong, what made a good antihero and why Paul...

The idea of a successful novel was something that was reviewed in the Observer and then sank without trace. Literature wasn’t a happening thing in those days. Music and fringe theatre and television playwriting were...

The literature of impotence is about to develop beyond measure.

As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

I wished I hadn’t majored in women filling their pockets with stones and sticking their heads into ovens. Maybe tomorrow the pinhole would widen and I would want to be a marine biologist.

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.

You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don’t fall for their promises.

A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.

Why is contemporary China short of works that speak directly? Because we writers cannot speak directly, or rather we can only speak in an indirect way.Why does contemporary China lack good works that critique our...

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.