Books Quote by Nicholas Royle

What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not…

— John Dufresne

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes…

— Neil Gaiman

Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently:…

— Brian Boyd

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or…

— George Steiner

Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.

— Christopher Isherwood

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.

— Sloane Crosley

I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good…

— Peter Orner

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for…

— Jayne Anne Phillips

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read…

— Jonathan Lethem

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of…

— Gore Vidal

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in…

— Robert Hass

“At times I wondered whether writing was not a solipsistic luxury in countries like mine, where there were scant readers, so many people who…

— Mario Vargas Llosa