8 Quotes by Paul West

fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work

Language is the thing that exceeds us all, being not merely conduit or message, but a placeless frieze of timeless resonance, a maze of etymology in which its ancient users and misusers whisper to us with dead glottises.

Minimalism is close to mediocrity and mindlessness, a way for the ungifted to have a literary career, and for readers who really hate literature to pretend to be reading something serious.

Doomed to practice it day after day, even to the extent of dipping his nib in orange juice to make the words invisible, he has fallen in love with secrecy.

No worthwhile book is going to go through them like a laxative.

What’s that dreadful phrase? Reader-friendly? It isn’t reader friendly; it’s saying to the reader, “I bet you can’t take this, and if you can you’re the kind of reader I want and you’ll stay with me. If you can’t take it, I don’t want you to read me anyway.

The impulse behind purple prose, he wrote, “is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened by something intolerably vivid.

Work often gets in the way of more important things, like writing.