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Alphabetical listing, by author....Please feel free to email me your favorite quotes; I'd love to add them to the list!
“There are only two things to write about: life and death.”
“Write to register history.”
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
“...Any publication opportunity you can seize is worth seizing; ever-widening ripples move out from event he smallest splash.”
“Every human being has exactly the same amount of time, and yet consider the output of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Peabody Harrington, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, William Goldman, Neil Simon, Joyce Carol Oates, Agatha Christie, and John Gardner. How did they accomplish what they have? They weren’t deflected from their priorities by activities of lesser importance. The work continues, even though everything else may have to give. They know that their greatest resource is themselves. Wasting time is wasting themselves. When people ask them, ‘Where do you find the time?’ they wonder, ‘Where do you lose it?’”
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
“The short story makes a modest appeal for attention, slips up on your blind side and wrassles you to the mat before you know what’s grabbed you.”
“No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.” (on breaking the four-minute mile)
“Write about what you’re most afraid of.”
“The author performs a function; the writer an activity.”
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
“You put a character out there and you’re in their power. You’re in trouble if they’re in yours.”
“It is the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.”
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
“Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.”
“Surround yourself with people who respect and treat you well.”
“When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.”
“I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.
“May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories. . . .
“[M]ay you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
**
“Tell me no pointless jokes.
“I will laugh at your refusal to allow me laughter.
“Build me no tension toward tears and refuse me my lamentations.
“I will go find me better wailing walls.
“Do not clench my fists for me and hid the target.
“I might strike you, instead.
“Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship’s rail.”
**
“What do you think of the world? Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
“Now this is very important and can hardly be emphasized too strongly: you have decided to write at four o’clock, and at four o’clock write you must!”
“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.”
“It is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bount to fake one of them, it had better be life.”
“A writer’s life is not designed to reassure your mother.”
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
“It is important that a novel be approached with some urgency. Spend too long on it, or have great gaps between writing sessions, and the unity of the work tends to be lost.”
“No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.”
**
“I learned to turn my creativity over to the only god I could believe in, the god of creativity, the life force Dylan Thomas called ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’ I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me. I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard.”
**
“I simply wrote. No negotiations. Good, bad? None of my business. I wasn’t doing it. By resigning as the self-conscious author, I wrote freely.”
**
“Get out of the way. Let it work through you. Accumulate pages, not judgments.”
**
“In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty.”
“It is immoral not to tell.”
“Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.”
“[R]eading is an act of contemplation. Writing is simply a part of that ritual activity. I write that I may read, and so contemplate what I have written.”
“I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss a work in progress. Never answer a critic.”
**
“Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.”
“If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.”
**
“You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.”
“Write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.”
“A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.”
“Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em wait, make ‘em cry.”
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.”
“I heard some writer say that his ‘father was a truck driver, and you know what, never in his life did that man get truck driver’s block.’”
“Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.”
“At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.”
“What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
**
“Publication is the auction of the mind of man.”
[We must] “fall through the words into the story.”
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.”
**
“You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arm, like a drunk, and say, ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting.’”
**
“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
[Good writing creates] “not the fact that it’s raining but the feel of being rained upon.”
**
“Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
**
“Writing teachers invariably tell students, Write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you now until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing. What did Kafka know? The insurance business? So that kind of advice is foolish, because it presumes that you have to go out to a war to be able to do war. Well, some do and some don’t. I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.”
**
“You have to surrender to the act of writing, give up to it, and trust that if you have anything, it will discover it for you.”
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
**
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
“No one put a gun to your head and ordered you to become a writer. One writes out of his own choice and must be prepared to take the rough spots along the road with a certain equanimity, though allowed some grinding of the teeth.”
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” (with Irving Mills)
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.”
“If you wish to be a writer, write.”
“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
**
“Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency. . .to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
**
“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
“Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has changed and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
**
“A writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
**
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
“I think that to write well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice—they all make fine fuel.”
“Reporting on the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.”
**
“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”
**
“You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.”
“Human language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to when all the while we want to move the stars to pity.”
“Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan—that is the rule.”
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.”
“Write in any way that works for you: Write in a tuxedo or in the shower with a raincoat or in a cave deep in the woods.”
**
“In nearly all good fiction, the basic—all but inescapable—plot form is: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.”
“I shut my eyes in order to see.”
“The true novelist listens to [his characters] and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.”
**
“One of the great rules of art: do not linger.”
**
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
“Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
**
“Rage is to writers what water is to fish.”
“If I were to shoot my publisher in some nice public place with plenty of blood, I guarantee my novels would be back in print in plenty of time for the trial. . .and the world would be better off.”
“Writers live twice.”
**
“Sometimes people say to me, ‘I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,’ and so on.
“I say to them, ‘There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.”
**
“Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.”
**
“If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you. Maybe it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to learn something, go to the source. Basho, the great seventeenth-century Haiku master said, ‘If you wnt to know about a tree, go to the tree.’ If you want to know poetry, read it, listen to it. Let those patterns and forms be imprinted in you. Don’t step away from poetry to analyze a poem with your logical mind. Enter poetry with your whole body. Dogen, a great Zen master, said, ‘If you walk in the mist, you get wet.’ So just listen, read, and write. Little by little, you will come closer to what you need to say and express it through your voice.”
**
“Success makes you ridiculous; you end up wearing nightgowns to dinner.”
“The solitude of writing is. . .quite frightening. It’s close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
“I write; let the reader learn to read.”
“The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.”
“You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper.”
“It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.”
“Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.”
“For Christ sake write and don’t worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. . . .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.” (in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934)
**
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.”
**
“Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“Write what makes you happy.”
“Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.”
“It is the deepest desire of every writer, the one we never admit or even dare to speak of: to write a book we can leave as a legacy. And although it is sometimes easy to forget, wanting to be a writer is not about reviews or advances or how many copies are printed or sold. It is much simpler than that, and much more passionate. If you do it right, and if they publish it, you may actually leave something behind that can last forever.”
“A word once let out of the cage cannot be whistled back again.”
“The only true creative aspect of writing is the first draft. That’s when it’s coming straight from your head and your heart, a direct tapping of the unconscious. The rest is donkey work. It is, however, donkey work that must be done.”
“Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story that you most desperately want to read.”
“Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.”
**
“I know everything. One has to, to write decently.”
**
“The author makes his readers, just as he makes his characters.”
“We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic.”
**
“We cannot escape fear. We can only transform it into a companion that accompanies us on all our exciting adventures. . . .Take a risk a day—one small or bold stroke that will make you feel great once you have done it.”
“Every author does not write for every reader.”
**
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children then the unlived life of the parent.”
**
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
“One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others’ minds.”
“Don’t think and then write it down. Think on paper.”
Be in love with yr life
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
**
“Never did tell you my theory of writing. If it isn’t spontaneous, right unto the very sound of the mind, it can only be crafty and revised, by which the paradox arises, we get what a man has hidden, i.e., his craft, instead of what we need, what a man has shown, i.e., blown (like jazz musician or rose)—
The requirements for prose & verse are the same, i.e blow—What a man most wishes to hide, revise, and un-say, is precisely what literature is waiting and bleeding for—Every doctor knows, every prophet knows the convulsion of truth.—Let the writer open his mouth & yap like Shakespeare and get said what is only irrecoverably said once in a time the way it comes, for time is of the essence—“ (in a letter to Malcolm Cowley, 1955)
“One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or 10 years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That’s what you wanted to write about, about what you didn’t know. So. What mysterious time and place don’t we know?”
“The first secret of good writing: We must look intently, and hear intently, and taste intently.”
“Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
**
“If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.”
“Tell me a story as it lies in your head.”
**
“When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.”
“Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes.”
“The process of writing is a process of inner expansion and reduction. It’s like an accordion: You open it and then ou bring it back, hoping that additional sound—a new clarity—may come out. It’s all for clarity.”
“Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”
“Use your eyes and ears. Think. Read. . .read. . .and still read. And then, when you have found your idea, don’t be afraid of it—or of your pen and paper; write it down as nearly as possible as you would express it in speech; swiftly, un-selfconsciously, without stopping to think about the form of it all. Revise it afterwards—but only afterwards. To stop and think about form in mid-career, while the idea is in motion, is like throwing out your clutch halfway up a hill or having to start in low again. You never get back to your old momentum.”
“Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.”
“Be really whole/And all things will come to you.”
**
“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”
**
“Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.” (1)
**
“Hold on to the center.” (5)
**
“She is detached from all things; that is why she is one with them. Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.” (7)
**
“In dwelling, live close to the ground.
“In thinking, keep to the simple.
“In conflict, be fair and generous.
“In governing, don’t try to control.
“In work, do what you enjoy.
“In family life, be completely present.
“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.” (8)
**
“Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.” (9)
**
“Giving birth and nourishing, having without possesing, acting with no expectations, leading and not trying to control: this is the supreme virtue.” (10)
**
“See the world as your self.
“Have faith in the way things are.
“Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things.” (13)
**
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?
“Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?
“The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment.
“Not seeking, not expecting, she is present, and can welcome all things.” (15)
**
“Empty your mind of all thoughts.
“Let your heart be at peace.
“Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return.” (16)
**
“The master doesn’t talk, he acts.
“When his work is done, the people say, ‘Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!’” (17)
**
“Express yourself completely, then keep quiet.
“Be like the forces of nature: when it blows, there is only wind; when it rains, there is only rain; when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.” (23)
**
“If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are.” (26)
**
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.
“A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is.
“. . .This is called embodying the light.” (27)
**
“When there is no desire, all things are at peace.” (37)
**
“Ordinary men hate solitude.
“But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.” (42)
**
“If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled.
“If your happiness depends upon money, you will never be happy with yourself.” (44)
**
“Seeing into darkness is clarity.
“Knowing how to yield is strength.
“Use your own light and return to the source of light.
“This is called practicing eternity.” (52)
**
“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.
“These three are your greatest treasures.
“Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being.
“Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.
“Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” (67)
**
“The hard and stiff will be broken.
“The soft and supple will prevail.” (76)
“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”
“I just write when fear overtakes me.”
“When I’m really writing, I’m listening.”
“There isn’t any secret. You sit down and you start and that’s it.”
“In the writing process, the more a thing cooks, the better.”
“The effable is preferable to the ineffable.”
“Don’t say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description.”
“The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.”
“Most people quit. If you don’t quit, if you rewrite, if you keep publishing in fancier places, you will understand that ‘What’s the secret?’ is not the question, which is, ‘Are you having fun?’”
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
“You have to assume that the act of writing is the most important of all. If you start worrying about people’s feelings, then you get nowhere at all.”
**
“First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about.”
“It’s much more important to write than to be written about.”
**
“Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health.”
“You can never know enough about your characters.”
**
“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
**
“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”
“Every novelist ought to invent his own technique.”
“You must be aware that the reader is at least as bright as you are.”
“In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of the novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.”
“A writer has to have some kind of compulsive drive to do his work. If you don’t have it, you’d better find another kind of work, because it’s only compulsion that will drive you through the psychological nightmares of writing.”
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
**
“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.”
“The best technique is no technique at all.”
**
“Stick to Zen. Fuck the work.” (in a letter to Lawrence Durrell, 1989)
**
“Write with a smile, even when it’s horrible or tragic.”
**
“Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.”
“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.”
“We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I’m not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for that.”
“Don’t market yourself. Editors and readers don’t know what they want until they see it. Scratch what itches. Write what you need to write, feed the hunger for meaning in your life. Play at the serious questions of life and death.”
**
“Put your notes away before you begin a draft. What you remember is probably what should be remembered; what you forget is probably what should be forgotten. No matter; you’ll have a chance to go back to your notes after the draft is completed. What is important is to achieve a draft which allows the writing to flow.”
“Caress the detail, the divine detail.”
“With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.”
“I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time. . . .You’ve got to wait before you write about them.”
“The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake. You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is of no concern of the writer.”
**
“You can’t clobber any reader while he’s looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.”
“Write what you really think and mean, not what you think you should think and not what you thought you would think and not what you hope it will mean, but what is really authentic and true.”
“I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don’t always whittle down; sometimes you whittle up.”
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
“The life which is not examined is not worth living.”
“You do not create a style. You work and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”
“If you require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
“If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.”
“What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.”
“I don’t have a lot of respect for talent. Talent is genetic. It’s what you do with it that counts.”
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
“Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.”
“Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places. . . .I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.”
“Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make. . . .They make them for their own protection, and to hell with them.”
“It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.”
[Writing, like dreaming,] “sometimes tells us what we are not ready to hear.”
“The man who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
“Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.”
“Tell almost the whole story.”
“Action is eloquence.”
“An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts on himself.”
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.”
“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
“You have to sink down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.”
“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”
**
“But don’t think for a moment that you will ever be forgiven for being what they call ‘different.’ You won’t! I still have not been forgiven. Only when I am delivered in a pine box will I be considered ‘safe.’ After I had written the Grapes of Wrath and it had been to a large extent read and sometimes burned, the librarians at Salinas Public Library, who had known my folks, remarked that it was lucky my parents were dead so that they did not have to suffer this shame. I tell you this so you may know what to expect.
“Now get to work—.”
(in a letter to Dennis Murphy, 1956)
“I see but one rule: to be clear.”
“The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth.”
**
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”
“Don’t get it right, get it written.”
“You don’t write. You get out of the way.”
“A novelist’s characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.”
“Don’t say the old lady screamed—bring her on and let her scream.”
**
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
“If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, and more, guilty about idleness and solitude.”
**
“Why should we all use our creative power. . .? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.”
“You have to have that feeling of ‘I’ll show them.’ If you don’t have it, don’t become a writer. It’s part of the animal, it’s primitive, but if you don’t want to rise above the crowd, forget it.”
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
**
“When I hear about writer’s block, this one and that one! Fuck off! Stop writing, for Christ’s sake: You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.”
“Ay, now the plot thickens.”
“Writers get to treat their mental illnesses every day.”
**
“Don’t put anything in a story that does not reveal character or advance in action.”
“If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.”
“The writer’s fundamental attempt is to understand the meaning of his own experiences. If he can’t break through those issues that concern him deeply, he’s not going to be very good.”
“Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore.”
“The ultimate concern of the artist is not to paint mountains and clouds and trees but the air between them.”
“You will never be satisfied with what you do.”
“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order. . . the continuous thread of revelation.”
“If you want to be a novelist you have to know people. You have to know the dimensions in which they have lived, do live, or may live.”
“I dream of an eagle, I give birth to a hummingbird.” (old French proverb rephrased)
“A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter.”
**
“When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.”
“Resist much, obey little.”
“And with that sentence I am hooked.”
“The terror of the white page in the typewriter.”
“Poke around.”
“Summon all your courage, exert all your vigilance, invoke all the gifts that Nature has been induced to bestow. Then let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses, sparrows—whatever come along the street—until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole. That perhaps is your task—to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesised [sic] in the poet’s way—that is what we look to you to do now.”
“We write to know ourselves.”
“Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”
**
“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”
**
“Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.”