“Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English." The Instrumentalities of the Night: An Interview with Glen Cook, The SF Site, September 2005”
“Between
the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering
go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.” Vladimir
Nabokov
“Short
stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing
of the focus.” Joan Didion
“A
book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf — at any rate it
is safer from criticism.” Herman Melville
“The
poet’s, the writer’s, duty is … to help man endure by lifting his heart.” William
Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
“In
a country this large and a language even larger … there ought to be a living
for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.” John
Updike
“To make
your life being a writer, it’s an auto-slavery … you are both the slave and the
task-master.” Susan Sontag
The
difference between blind optimism and the urge to improve the world’s
imperfection. Chinua Achebe
“The
test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has
stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the
people they wanted to please.” Willa Cather: Writing Through Troubled
Times
“My
belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man
who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose,
will work the best.” Anthony Trollope: Witty and Wise Advice on How to
Be a Successful Writer
“For
a person whose sole burning ambition is to write — like myself — college is
useless beyond the Sophomore year.” William Styron: Why Formal
Education Is a Waste of Time for Writers
“We
find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and
growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil,
we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.” Madeleine
L’Engle: Creativity, Censorship, Writing, and the Duty of Children’s Books
“The
writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at
times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.” Saul
Bellow: How Writers and Artists Save Us from the “Moronic Inferno” of Our Time
“Truth
that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper
is the impression it makes.” Schopenhauer on Style
“There
is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands
the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance
to be restored.” Flannery O’Connor: Why the Grotesque Appeals to Us,
Plus a Rare Recording of Her Reading
“The
only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole
cast of the author’s mind.” C.S. Lewis: The 3 Ways of Writing for
Children and the Key to Authenticity in All Writing
“Style
ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but
also feels it.” Nietzsche: 10 Rules for Writers
“It’s
the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can
quite do it as well as you want to, so there’s always something to wake up
tomorrow morning to do.” William Faulkner: Writing, the Human Dilemma,
and Why We Create
“It’s
a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think
sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four
and a half hours after you write the final word.” Zadie Smith: The
Psychology of the Two Types of Writers
“By
using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the
cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for
yourself.” George Orwell: Writing, How to Counter the Mindless Momentum
of Language, and the Four Questions a Great Writer Must Ask Herself
“Success
consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from
a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search… for the
sentence in which every word is unalterable.” Italo Calvino: The Art of
Quickness, Digression as a Hedge Against Death, and the Key to Great Writing
“All
makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard
and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.” Ursula K. Le Guin:
Where Ideas Come From, the “Secret” of Great Writing, and the Trap of Marketing
Your Work
“If
you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones… After all,
there are better ways to starve to death.” Gabriel García Márquez on
His Unlikely Beginnings as a Writer
“I
doubt I would have written a line … unless some minor tragedy had sort of
twisted my mind out of the normal rut.” Roald Dahl: How Illness
Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor
“The
sidelong glance is what you depend on.” Robert Frost: How to Read Intelligently
and Write a Great Essay
“When
you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and
still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on.” Lewis
Carroll: How to Work Through Difficulty and His Three Tips for Overcoming
Creative Block
“It’s
such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay
attention.” Mark Strand: The Heartbeat of Creative Work and the
Artist’s Task to Bear Witness to the Universe
“Just
set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes
out. And that’s the only way it does.” John Steinbeck: The Diary as a
Tool of Discipline, a Hedge Against Self-Doubt, and a Pacemaker for the
Heartbeat of Creative Work
“Anyone
who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up,
not down.” E.B. White: How to Write for Children and the Writer’s
Responsibility to All Audiences
Consolation
for those moments when you can’t tell whether you’re “the divinest genius or
the greatest fool in the world.” Virginia Woolf: Writing and Self-Doubt
“If
we think that our reader is an idiot, we should not use rhetorical figures, but
if we use them and feel the need to explain them, we are essentially calling
the reader an idiot. In turn, he will… Umberto Eco’s Advice to Writers
“Luckily
for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.” Grace
Paley: The Value of Not Understanding Everything
“All
creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive,
enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind.” Joseph
Conrad on Art and What Makes a Great Writer, in a Beautiful Tribute to Henry
James
“In any
art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.” Hemingway’s
Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading List of
Essential Books for Aspiring Writers
“Talent
is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the
usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” James
Baldwin’s Advice on Writing
“It’s by
writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are
most present.” Alison Bechdel on Writing, Therapy, Self-Doubt, and How
the Messiness of Life Feeds the Creative Conscience
