“An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should
constantly wonder whether what they’re creating has merit. And then, having
doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can’t make it better.” Johnny Rich
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization
that he has come upon the right word. Catherine
Drinker Bowen
T.S. Eliot on Writing: His Warm and Wry Letter of Advice to a
Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Aspiring to Become a Writer; “Don’t write at first for
anyone but yourself.”
“The best kind of writing,
and the biggest thrill in writing, is to suddenly read a line from your
typewriter that you didn’t know was in you.”
“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”
“The ending has to fit. The ending has to matter and make sense.
I could care less about whether it’s happy or sad or atomic.
The ending is the place where you go, ‘Aha. Of course. That’s
right.’”
Carrie Jones
“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
“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
