38 Quotes by Hortense Calisher

It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

The novel is rescued life.

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.

Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.