Books Quote by John Steinbeck

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”

— John Steinbeck

Creating one single story often requires experimenting and planning and falling on your literary rear more than once before you find the way that…

— Nancy Lam

Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being.…

— Gina Berriault

“Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.”

— Stephen King

“Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.”

— Harold Bloom

There are two sides to every story, but unfortunately one story can ruin too many!

— Michelle D

If you have no conflict, you have no story. That's number one. That's a rule of novels.

— Nicholas Sparks

There is one story and one story only.

— Robert Graves

There is but one poetry,--true poetry.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

— Colum McCann

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

— Charles Stross

Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson