E. M. Forster Writing Quotations

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.