WRITERS on WRITING
compiled by Kerry Temple
Prairie Winds 2008
1) In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.
-- Henry David Thoreau
2) Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
-- Peter Abelard
3) Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.
-- Gustave Flaubert
4) Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
-- Robert Frost
5) Writing is to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
-- William Faulkner
6) Writing is a privilege. A joy. A pain in the ass. The easiest thing in the world to do. The most difficult feat to pull off. It is profound. It is ridiculous. Better than making love. Akin to dying. More trouble than it’s worth. Like rolling down a hill. Like scaling the Alps. Whatever it is—and it’s all of the above—it’s not for amateurs. You really have to want to write, to write.
-- Rod McKuen
7) Writing, I think, is an interestingly perverse occupation. It is quite sick in the sense of normal human enjoyment of life, because the writer is always removed.
-- Edna O’Brien
8) If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader.
-- John Steinbeck
9) People are always asking me if I believe that writing can be taught. My answer is, “No, I don’t think writing can be taught.” But on the other hand, if I were a young writer and convinced of my talent, I could do a lot worse than to attend a really good college workshop—for one reason only. Any writer, and especially the talented writer, needs an audience. The more immediate that audience is, the better for him because it stimulates him in his work; he gets a better view of himself.
-- Truman Capote
10) This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades. They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence.
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
11) All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggle to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.
-- George Orwell
12) Reading without thinking is nothing. For a book is less important for what it says than what it makes you think.
-- Louis L’Amour
13) All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, than you are a writer.
-- Ernest Hemingway
14) For me, writing was an act of love. It was an attempt not to get the world’s attention, it was an attempt to be loved.
-- James Baldwin
15) I can say now that one of the big reasons for writing was this: I instinctively recognized an opportunity to transcend some of my personal failing—things about myself I didn’t particularly like and wanted to change but didn’t know how.
-- John Steinbeck
16) No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
-- Samuel Johnson
17) Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary works, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
-- William Strunk, Jr.
18) What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
-- Samuel Johnson
19) All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and I took out a comma; in the afternoon I put it back.
-- Oscar Wilde
20) The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
-- Flannery O’Connor
21) If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
22) Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.
-- Elizabeth Janeway
23) What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it is raining.
-- Noel Coward
24) Each book is a tabula rasa; from book to book I seem to forget how to get characters in and out of rooms—a far more difficult task than the nonwriter might think. Still I went to my office every day. That is the difference between the professional and the amateur. The professional guts a book through this period, in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve, and a failure of nerve is the best definition I know for writer’s block.
-- John Gregory Dunne
25) I hate to write, but I love to have written.
-- Dorothy Parker
26) The end is nothing, the road is all.
-- Willa Cather
27) To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
-- H.L. Mencken
28) The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
-- Mark Twain
29) The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
-- Samuel Johnson
30) My advice to any writer is never think of the effect of what you are doing while you are doing it. Don’t project to a possible audience while you are writing. Hold on to your idea and get it down, and then maybe there’ll be an audience, and maybe there won’t. But have the courage to write whatever you dream is for yourself.
-- May Sarton
31) A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness… It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
-- Robert Frost
32) The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
-- Alfred Kazin
33) Only mediocre writers are always at their best.
-- Somerset Maughm
34) Beginners may hear amateurs exclaim that writing is fun, but professionals know it is akin to scraping a thumbnail across a rough brick.
-- Ed Fischer
35) Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.
-- Anthony Hope Hawkins
36) I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find out what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive.
-- Susan Sontag
37) The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
-- Mary Heaton Vorse
38) When Students ask me how to become a writer, I tell them: “Sit and write; and when you get up 10 years later, you may be a writer.”
-- Richard Sullivan
39) I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced… the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
-- Ernest Hemingway
40) You sit and think about it, or split wood and think about it, or drive to town and think about it. Just turn it over, keep turning it over until a light bursts through. Parts of it will fall away and I’ll be left with what I was after all along and didn’t realize.
-- Barry Lopez
41) When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of you having said it are only fair.
-- E.B. White
42) The true artist declares himself by leaving out a lot. The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.
-- Goethe
43) The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.
-- T.S. Eliot
44) If it is any use to know it, I always try to write in the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
-- Ernest Hemingway
45) All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
46) I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.
-- Joyce Carol Oates
47) You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
-- G.K. Chesterton
48) At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.
-- Eudora Welty
49) The task of the writer is, before all, to make you see. That, and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed you shall find there encouragement, consolation, fear, charm -- all you demand -- and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
-- Joseph Conrad
50) Not all writers are artists. But all of use like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, “Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century.”
-- William Attwood
51) A writer is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations.
-- Charles de Montesquieu
52) There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer has to do is what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done. Only dead men are useful as standards, as competitors, because only their work has been tested by time and has proven value. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply against whoever is in the race with him. Unless he runs against time, he will never know what he is capable of attaining.
-- Ernest Hemingway
53) What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself -- and thus make yourself indispensable.
-- Andre Gide
54) My advice to young writers is that you must always keep trying. If you can’t take the criticism, then you’re not a writer. You’ve got to be able to take it. Hold on, trust your talent, and work hard.
-- Mary Sarton
55) To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
-- Gertrude Stein
56) That’s the difference. There are writers, and there are authors. Anybody can be an author. But it’s one thing to get your name under a title and get it set in type, and quite another to be a writer. Many of the latter never see print. That’s a crime, but it’s the way the world is run, unfortunately. Some guys write because they have found a relaxing, nonstrenuous way to beat the hard work system. Others do it because it’s catharsis’ these are the gut-spillers. Still others do it because they like to keep eating. Then there are the poor, damned souls who must write, who haven’t any more choice in the matter than whether or not they breathe.
-- Harlan Ellison
57) I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.
-- Charlotte Bronte
58) Art begins with resistance -- at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
-- Andre Gide
59) I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
-- Francoise Sagan
60) Many people who call themselves writers and have their names on books are not writers -- the difference being, a bullfighter who fights a bull is different from a bullshitter who makes passes with no bull there. The writer has been there or he can’t write about it. And going there he risks being gored.
-- William Burroughs
61) Many people who want to be writers don’t really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.
-- James Michener
62) In my own experience, nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.
-- John Gardner