Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

On writing






“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”
                                                                                                 John Steinbeck

“It’s a funny thing about writing. You get so balled up in a story idea that you lose your perspective and forget that human being might read your words someday.” Gary Reilly


“Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.”  W.H. Auden





“The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave  anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the  genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.” Pat Conroy

 “I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.” Joan Didion


“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself…It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent”     
                                                                                                                               Harper Lee

“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.”
                                                                                               Gerald Brenan

 “I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it?”

                                                            Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not