“Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”
More from E.M. Forster on Writing
“Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.”
“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”
“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”
“The historian records, but the novelist creates.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
Madeleine L'Engle
6 quotes“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”