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Northrop Frye Quotes about Writing

All Northrop Frye Quotes Art Atheism Belief Criticism Culture Hell Imagination Language Literature Metaphor Myth Mythology Study Writing quotes
A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

Northrop Frye
Writing, Mean, People
Northrop Frye (2014). “The Northrop Frye Quote Book”, p.89, Dundurn

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

Northrop Frye
Writing, May, Attributes
Northrop Frye (1996). “Collected Works of Northrop Frye: The educated imagination and other writings on critical theory 1933-1963”

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

Northrop Frye
Writing, Aphorism, Translate
Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz,'The Literature Professors' Literature Professor', in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall1978.

For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.

Northrop Frye
Writing, People, Giving
Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.451, University of Toronto Press

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

Northrop Frye
Book, Writing, Myth

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.

Northrop Frye
Writing, Looks, Use
Northrop Frye (1964). “The Educated Imagination”, p.56, Indiana University Press

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