“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
