“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
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Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor 1899–1977Related quotes
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
As quoted in The Star (1959) and Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green.
“I said "writer," not "poet;" I did have some common sense.”
On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: My English teacher from 1955, run to ground by some documentary crew trying to explain my life, said that in her class I had showed no particular promise. This was true. Until the descent of the giant thumb, I showed no particular promise. I also showed no particular promise for some time afterwards, but I did not know this. A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. If I had not been ignorant in this particular way, I would not have announced to an assortment of my high school female friends, in the cafeteria one brown-bag lunchtime, that I was going to be a writer. I said "writer," not "poet;" I did have some common sense. But my announcement was certainly a conversation-stopper. Sticks of celery were suspended in mid-crunch, peanut-butter sandwiches paused halfway between table and mouth; nobody said a word. One of those present reminded me of this incident recently — I had repressed it — and said she had been simply astounded. "Why?," I said. "Because I wanted to be a writer?" "No," she said. "Because you had the guts to say it out loud."
"William Shtner on Sci-Fi, Aging and the Environment" http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/08/22/in-the-magazine/shatner.html as interviewed by Jeanne Wolf, Saturday Evening Post, September/October 2017
The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence.
“In Woodstock Nation there are no writers—only poet-warriors.”
Landing a Man on the Earth Without the Help of Norman Mailer
Woodstock Nation (1969)
“The travel writer seeks the world we have lost — the lost valleys of the imagination.”
"Bwana Vistas," Harper’s (August 1985), reprinted in Corruptions of Empire (1988).