Writers on Writing
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."— James Baldwin
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
— Benjamin Franklin
"All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness."
— Eckhart Tolle
"We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic." He concludes, "Whatever the many failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born."
— John Updike, in a letter to his parents
John Updike's Archive: A Great Writer at Work
"It is energy that will see you through--to get your work done, to survive rejection. Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave."
— Frederick Busch
Boldtype: An Interview with Frederick Busch
"Substitute 'damn' every time you are inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain
"As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose."
— Rainer Maria Rilke
"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."
— Roald Dahl
"My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea–she put her finger inside the cup."
— Flannery O'Connor - Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction
"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it - don't cheat with it."
— Ernest Hemingway
"Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book, your composition of yourself is at stake."
— E. L. Doctorow
Best Lines
"—Here they are again—the bent boys, baked and buzzed boys, wasted, red-eyed, dry-mouth high boys, coursing narrow bright aisles hunting food as fried as they are, twitchy hands wadding bills they spill on the counter, so pleased and so proud, as if they're the very inventors of stoned—"
The Financial Lives of the Poets, Jess Walter
"A fairy tale starts out 'Once Upon A Time.' A fisherman's tale starts out 'This Ain't No Bullshit.'"
Capt. Phil Harris, F/V Cornelia Marie
"Turn toward it like you’ll die if you don’t."
Best Advice, Tina Nettesheim, Narrative Magazine
"The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change."
You Can't Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe
"The life that produces writing can't be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way..."
Old School, Tobias Wolff
