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

The Torturer's Horse Scratches It's Innocent Behind

The torturer’s horse scratches it’s innocent behind on a tree….The old masters: how well they understood the human position: how it takes place when someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

On this fine cool morning, all is still. Even the birds are quiet and a low-lying fog blankets the downward slope of the farm and drifts across the pond and through the trees. It feels like a Thoreau morning, and I wonder at all he saw and felt. I think of all those who came before and all they knew and wish I could offer one of them a cup of coffee and a seat on my porch as I put on my own horrible sneakers.

These are some of my favorite lines from literary masters of old. Can you guess who they are?

1. "About suffering, they were never wrong."

2. "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."

3. "A novel is a mirror walking along a main road."

4. "A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

5. "A writer’s material is what he cares about."

6. "Literature thrives on taboos.”

7. "Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it."

8.  "It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.”

9. "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

10. "I've led a good rich sexual life and I don’t see why it should be left out.”

11. "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in  my

       own horrible sneakers."

So write of taboos-leave nothing out- and be wary of who you show your drafts to. Balance on a limb and fabricate. Observe the world carefully and don’t be afraid to write what you are passionate about. Hang a piece of art, arrange a bouquet, and write a sentence that fills a page. Be prepared to suffer.

1. Auden

2. Dickinson

3. Stendhal

4. Lichtenberg

5. Gardner

6. Burgess

7. Thoreau

8. Eliot

9. Wells

10. Miller

11. Parker

The opening quote is from Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts

Writers on Writing

This is a writer's chair. What? you say, where are the writing tools? Where is the electrical outlet? Don't jump ahead. One must first sit and watch, and much has passed by the front of this chair. Generations of writers have sat in this chair.

This is our old milkhouse which I hope to turn into a produce washing and storing station. The cement block exterior keeps the interior cool. I see a face looking out, eyes wide so as not to miss a thing. If you look at a thing long enough, it becomes something else, just as words can change their meanings right in front of your tired eyes.

Because I'm a sucker for tidbits of brevity and wit, I like quotations. I have compiled a list of my favorite quotes by writers and arranged them in an order that makes sense to me.

It is not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.
T.S. Eliot

A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

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

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets….when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Charles Bukowski

Loneliness is your companion for life. If you don’t want to be lonely, you get into TV.
William Styron

When you’re writing, that’s when you’re lonely. I suppose that gets into the characters you’re writing about. There are hours and hours of silence.
Dick Francis

Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.
Samuel Beckett

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there’s no holding me.
William Faulkner

Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system.
John Gardner

Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Use one startling adjective per page.
Anne Bernays

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
Mark Twain

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain

A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.
John Steinbeck

You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you afford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.
Irwin Shaw

I am profoundly uncertain about how to write. I know what I love or what I like, because it’s a direct, passionate response. But when I write I’m very uncertain whether it’s good enough. That is, of course, the writer’s agony.
Susan Sontag

You can never know enough about your characters.
W. Somerset Maugham

We like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau


In looking over these, I realize that four of my favorites have to do with angst, which is the writer’s lot in life. But I believe there is nothing more worthwhile than writing. And when you get the words right—find the perfect word or an original metaphor—it’s like a mental orgasm. The highs, however infrequent, far outweigh the ever-pounding lows. If you are a writer, you will write, regardless of the clanging gong of the critic and the shattering rejection of the agent.

So, are you a writer? This is my list of ten attributes I believe you must have to be a writer.

1. Perseverance
2. Empathy
3. Affection for alcohol
4. Self-esteem
5. Imagination
6. Drivenness
7. Indifference
8. Willingness to sacrifice the ordinary TV-watching pleasures of society
9. An accurate eye
10. Fondness for daydreaming and eavesdropping.

Numbers 6 and 7 go hand in hand. Drivenness is what allows you to be indifferent to whether or not your novel sells which allows you to plod ahead. It helps you shrug off the well-meaning questions about what you’re doing with yourself and are you still working on that book and why don’t you answer your phone or organize your life and do something worthwhile (meaning something that will make you money). Questions asked with a puzzled look, because if you aren’t a writer you can never understand the trancelike state that writing requires and the sought-after solitude that is our aphrodisiac.