Birth Quote by Janet Burroway

Life can be unsettling. Writers have always gravitated to conflict, unhappiness and disturbing themes. We as readers would get bored pretty quickly if stories…

— Clarence Major

Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

— Javier Marías

Literature acknowledges that life is complicated.

— Sjon

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

— Mark Slouka

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

— Rose Tremain

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

— Peter Hedges

Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot…

— Philip Larkin

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.

— Cynthia Ozick

“Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all, story work in…

— Nicola Griffith

“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably…

— Martin Amis

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes…

— Mary Augusta Ward