Writers On Writing

As we close the door on 2019 with high hopes for the new decade, I thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes from poets and writers, from Mary Oliver to Elmore Leonard. Good luck with your writing and Happy New Year!

“Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

 -Mary Oliver

  "Why say very beautiful? Beautiful is enough," said James Joyce, hardly a miser when it came to words.

"A  writer must take infinite pains-if he writes only one great story in his life, that is better than writing a hundred bad ones-and that finally the pains the writer takes must be his own."
 - John Gardner

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
  -Saul Bellow

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

"If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel."

 -    author unknown
Or..
     As Elmore Leonard said, "the reader  either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care."

"Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life."
  - Barbara Kingsolver

 "The true novelist is the one who doesn't quit, though the rigors of novel-writing generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are  authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough."
   -John Gardner

And, finally, the one that haunts me in the dead of night when sleep eludes me:

"What do you plan to do with your one, wild precious life?"
   -Mary Oliver