Fifty Quotations About Writing
1. “Life is so short we must move very slowly.” ‒‒ Naomi Shihab Nye
2. “But I am concerned rather with an internal than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people do not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.” ‒‒ G. K. Chesterton
3. “You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.” ‒‒ F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. “I want stories to startle and engage me within the first few sentences, and in their middle to widen or deepen or sharpen my knowledge of human activity, and to end by giving me a sensation of completed statement. The ending is where the reader discovers whether he has been reading the same story the writer thought he was writing.” ‒‒ John Updike
5. “I’ve never been in charge of my stories, they’ve always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I’ve followed the advice I’ve shared with other writers over the years: jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” ‒‒ Ray Bradbury
6. “It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn’t dull, but the quality of attention that we do or do not pay to it. Dull subjects are those we have failed.” ‒‒ William Matthews
7. “While short stories often tell us things we don’t know anything about‒‒and this is good of course‒‒they should also, and maybe more importantly, tell us what everybody knows but what nobody is talking about. At least not publicly.” ‒‒ Raymond Carver
8. “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but no one has ever gotten away with much.” ‒‒ Flannery O’Connor
9. “Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves toward the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.” ‒‒ John Berger
10. “To be difficult in writing, it turned out, was simple. All you had to do was leave out links between one image and the next, or drag in private memories the reader knew nothing about, or bury literary allusions here and there the way a squirrel buries acorns, or use words purely for the sake of their sounds while ignoring their sense. To be lucid, I decided, was more generous to readers, as well as more demanding of the writer, than to be obscure.” ‒‒ Scott Russell Sanders
11. “I learned the necessity of being harsh with your own material, excising or rewriting anything that doesn’t work. I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn‒‒that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.” ‒‒ Orson Scott Card
12. “My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.” — Anton Chekhov
13. “I want to be an honest man and a good writer, in that order.” ‒‒ James Baldwin
14. “I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they’re trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.” ‒‒ Marilynne Robinson
15. “Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101: 1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4) Every sentence must do one of two things‒‒reveal character or advance the action. 5) Start as close to the end as possible. 6) Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them‒‒in order that the reader may see what they are made of. 7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. 8) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.” ‒‒ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
16. “An obvious but key distinction between the literary and the middlebrow, between books that are art and those that simply are not, is not politics per se, which can play a part in either, but the quality of being beyond easy description. If a novel loses little through being synopsized in a page, it is not art but narrative. Narrative can be a skeleton for literature but clearly is not literature itself; that distinction belongs only to fiction that is comparable to other art forms, to poetry, to painting, to music, and cannot be represented by anything other than itself.” ‒‒ Lydia Millet
17. “I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is ‘depressing’ because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don’t seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; ‘witty’ stories, in which every problem is an occasion for a joke, ‘upbeat’ stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We’re grown-ups now, we get to stay in the kitchen when the other grown-ups talk.” — Tobias Wolff
18. “You must be aware that the reader is at least as bright as you are.” ‒‒ William Maxwell
19. “Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.” ‒‒ Nikki Giovanni
20. “I don’t like to throw characters into a plot as though it were a raging torrent where they are swept along. What interests me are the complications and nuances of character. Few of my characters are described externally; we see them from the inside out.” ‒‒ Michael Ondaatje
21. “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.” ‒‒ E. L. Doctorow
22. “Fail better.” ‒‒ Samuel Beckett, advice to writers
23. “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I have put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” ‒‒ George Orwell
24. “You write the words down, the first, the second, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh—suddenly you doubt. You sense clutter, or thinness, or cliché. If the word you doubted is among those already written down, you can cross it out. If it’s among the words you’re about to write, you can say to yourself, ‘No, not that one,’ and either go on without it, or wait for some alternative to come. Making these changes the moment they are perceived keeps the tale curving inward toward its own energy. Without this moment, this series of moments, this concatenation of doubts about language shattered by language, the text is only a document of time passed with some paper.” — Samuel Delany
25. “I’ve always loved best stories that leave shadowy places, unplayed notes, stories that one can sense going on after one closes the book.” ‒‒ Peter S. Beagle
26. “The opening line of a poem is like finding a fruit on the ground: a piece of fallen fruit that you’ve never seen before. The poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.” — Paul Valéry
27. “The emotions, in which all of us are involved for life, differ more in degree than in kind. Imagining yourself inside the skin, body, heart, and mind of any other person is the primary feat, but also the absolute necessity. Whether the person is man or woman, old or young, black or white, whether it’s a person at the point of coming into the fullness of life or of leaving life without it, makes only a secondary challenge.” ‒‒ Eudora Welty
28. “I spend many hours each day playing with sentences. I regard each sentence as a little wheel, and my ambition lately has been to gather several hundred of them together at once and to fit them all end to end, with the cogs interlocking, like gears, but with each wheel a different size, each turning at a different speed. Now and again I try to put a really big one right next to a very small one in such a way that the big one, turning slowly, will make the small one spin so fast that it hums. Very tricky, that.” — Roald Dahl
29. “I think people write the way their brain voices sound to them. Fiction is meant to be read inwardly, to march along with people’s inner circuitry, and the voice we hear in our heads is very different from the larynx sound.” — David Foster Wallace
30. “Whether unconsciously or by intent, as Poe was purported to do, the writer chooses subjects, adopts a tone, considers an order for the release of meaning, arrives at the rhythm, selects a series of appropriate sounds, determines the diction and measures the pace, turns the referents of certain words into symbols, establishes connections with companionable paragraphs, sizes up each sentence’s intended significance, and, if granted good fortune, because each decision might have been otherwise, achieves not just this or that bit of luminosity or suggestiveness, but her own unique lines of language, lines that produce the desired restitution of the self.” — William Gass
31. “The whole job is to write yourself into confusion or humility.” — George Saunders
32. “Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than what is commonly thought small.” — Virginia Woolf
33. “An artist must either give up art or develop. There are, of course, two ways of giving up: stopping altogether or taking the familiar Hollywood course‒‒making tricks out of what was once done for love.” ‒‒ Pauline Kael
34. “Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping stones.” — J.G. Ballard
35. “There are books that give back to art and there are books that give back to life.” — Mary Gaitskill
36. “Tastes are composed of a thousand distastes.” — François Truffaut
37. “Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language. In Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.” — Barry Lopez
38. “We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.” — Italo Calvino
39. “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours.” — Jorge Luis Borges
40. “Your ‘built-in, shock-proof bullshit detector,’ as Hemingway called it, is a good servant but a bad master. It should warn, not decide. If you rely too much on it, your main concern will no longer be to tell a story but instead to make it perfectly clear that you’re too exquisite and fastidious to be taken in by any trite, common little idea: picking up your story with a pair of tongs, as I once put it. We shouldn’t be afraid of the obvious, because stories are about life, and life is full of obvious things like food and sleep and love and courage which you don’t stop needing just because you’re a good reader.” — Philip Pullman
41. “To hear people disagreeing about books, hating and loving them, doesn’t make some of those people good and other ones bad. It just sounds like the noisy contentious clash and accord of people reading. You see, it’s my opinion that the most terrible statement you can utter is not ‘I hate X’ or ‘I love Y.’ The most terrible thing you can say, especially to your students, is: ‘You must hate X.’ Or: ‘You must love Y.’” — Scott Bradfield
42. “I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, ‘I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say’; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.” — Mary Ruefle
43. “As an art historian, I always spend the first day of every class explaining my own definition of art: ‘Art is an escape from “reality” that makes the return to “reality” somehow more magical, more understandable, or more bearable.” — Donald Harington
44. “The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.” — Roger Scruton
45. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
46. “When I write fiction, I’m absolutely free to please my most critical self, not the self that just likes everything I say. I’m scared to say this, but if I could name an audience, it would be God. It would be somebody I want very much to please but who is already pleased with me.” — Lewis Nordan
47. “In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.” ‒‒ John Gardner
48. “Whatever your mother says, your writing is magnificent.” — Yasunari Kawabata, in a letter to Yukio Mishima
49. “The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.” ‒‒ Richard Flanagan
50. “I do not understand what it is I have to do.” ‒‒ Leo Tolstoy, last words
“Doubt everything. Find your own light.” ‒‒ Gotama Buddha, last words (in the Theravada tradition)