I have stolen the following from the Varuna writers’ House blog. I love the funny and sometimes consoling advice from writers who know the difficulties.
Varuna Alumni Association: the craft, the writing life
Stick em up: quotes for your pinboard
Writers’ quotes to inspire, console, make sense of things.
WRITERS’ QUOTES
“ Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.”
- Bonnie Friedman
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.” – Arthur Miller
On finishing a book:
“You don’t say, ‘I’ve done it!’ You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realise that this will do.” – Anthony Burgess
“My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.”
- Anton Chekhov
“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”
-E.B. White
“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.”
- Hart Crane
“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”
- John Irving, Writers at Work, 1988
Tuesday, May 17th, 1932
What is the right attitude towards criticism? What ought I to feel and say when Miss B. devotes an article in Scrutiny to attacking me? She is young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I’m a very bad writer. Now I think the thing to do is to note the pith of what is said – that I don’t think – then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself. It is perhaps true that my reputation will now decline. I shall be laughed and pointed at. What should be my attitude – clearly Arnold Bennett and Wells took the cricitism of their youngers the wrong way. The right way is not to resent; not to be longsuffering and Christian and submissive either…The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme – thinking too much. And now that thorn is out – perhaps too easily.
- Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
“On completing a book, for a while you think, that must surely be the greatest novel written ever. And a surprisingly short time after that, it’s just hideously embarrassing, just hideously embarrassing, I can’t tell you. People compare it to having a child, and it’s very true. You have this long gestation, and then it comes out and you have a brief patch of postnatal depression, and then it’s incredibly cute and charming, and then suddenly, it’s a great, drunken adolescent being sick in front of you and it’s horrible. Horrible!”
- Philip Hensher
“In my experience, the angel does, almost always, come. If I keep faith. On some days, keeping faith means simply staying there, when more than anything else I want to get out of that room. It sometimes means going up without hope and without energy and turning on my computer. And, at the end of two or three hours, and without hope and without energy, I find that I have indeed written some sentences that wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t gone up to write them. And – what is even more surprising - these sentences written without hope or energy often turn out to be just as good as the ones I wrote with hope and energy.”
- Gail Godwin, “Rituals and Readiness”, in National Book Awards: The Writing Life
“All good writing is swimming underwater, holding your breath.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his daughter Frances.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
- George Orwell
“People talk about writers’ egos. I don’t know how any writer can have any ego left after a certain age.” – Amanda Lohrey
“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw it, bury it, unearth it – and gnaw it still.” – Thoreau
“In the middle of the silence in a writer’s house lies an invalid: the book being worked on.” - Richard Eder
“As the outside world grows less dependable, I keep buttressing my inside world, where people go on meaning well and surprising other people with little touches of grace. There are days when I sink into my novel like a pool and emerge feeling blank and bemused and used up. Then I drift over to the schoolyard and there’s this mother wondering if I’m doing anything halfway useful yet. Am I working? Have I found a job? No, I tell her. I’m still just writing.” – Anne Tyler
“Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.” – Marilynne Robinson
“Writers of fiction are collectors of useless information. They are the opposite of good, solid, wise citizens who collect good information and put it to good use. Fiction writers remember tiny little details, some of them almost malicious, but very telling.” – William Trevor
“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.” - William Faulkner
“When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I’m going to show them, this time. Without that, a lot of what passes under the name of creative energy would be lost.” - Kingsley Amis
“The novel tends to tell us everything, whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that intensely.” - VS Pritchett
“One of the tricks is to maintain your sense of awe at what you’re experiencing … I think Andre Gide said, ‘the only way to write about Africa is to go there for 10 days or 10 years’. So , I’m one of those 10-day, big-eyed guys. ” - Richard Price
INTERVIEWER: How do you realise you’re on the wrong track? Alice Munro: I could be writing away one day and think I’ve done very well; I’ve done more pages than I usually do. Then I get up the next morning and realize I don’t want to work on it anymore. When I have a terrible reluctance to go near it, when I would have to push myself to continue, I generally know that something is badly wrong. Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s sort of like a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and misery by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it. But that only seems to happen after I’ve said, No, this isn’t going to work, forget it. – Alice Munro
‘When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.’ – Flannery O’Connor
‘Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.’ – Raymond Chandler
‘There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.’ – Robert Graves
“Over the years, I’ve found one rule … If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write. The point is that you have to maintain trustworthy relations.” – Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing
“My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.” – Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, 1934.
“The virtues of understatement and self-restraint make social intercourse civilised and agreeable, but they have a paralysing effect on autobiography. The memoir-writer ought neither to spare himself nor hide his light under a bushel; he must obviously overcome his reluctance to relate painful and humiliating experiences, but he must also have the less obvious courage to include those experiences which show him in a favourable light.” – Arthur Koestler, in his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue
“I like to write when I feel spiteful: it’s like having a good sneeze.” – DH Lawrence, letter, 1913
“Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.” – Raymond Carver, http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,,-230,00.html
“One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.”
- Cynthia Ozick, The Writers’ Chapbook, 1989, George Plimpton ed
‘An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.’
- Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, 1938
“Therefore, be brave. Everyone has gone through the loss of faith in the material. Sometimes the novel dies beneath you like a horse, and when it begins to really smell, bury it. But not until it’s really putrid do you bury it.’ – Thomas Keneally in Writers on Writing, ed James Roberts, Barry Mitchell, Roger Zubrinich, Penguin
“Don’t let’s pity ourselves. We are the privileged. Our minds are lit by gas. There are so many people shivering in attics without even candles.” – Gustave Flaubert
“In writing novels I have never been able to place much importance upon the distinction between real and imagined. A novelist … makes as much or as little use of the real world as he needs to project his vision of life.” – Angus Wilson
“I loved those novels so much that I was paralysed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.” - Joan Didion, on the novels of Henry James
“The first page of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’” - Michael Ondaatje
“Writers are people who never stop being puzzled, in the way that small children are, about what’s going on about them … children are growing up into a world where no-one really explains anything to them. They can only make sense of things by looking close and trying to work out what’s going on. And I think most people seem after a certain time to decide they know how it all works. Writers are people who, really till the end of their days, never know how it works. Everything is a puzzle to them.” - David Malouf
“You get to the point where the divergence is as small as you can make it, accepting that you will always have a bigger, brighter and darker novel in mind than what you were able to get down on paper.” – Michael Cunningham
“Childhood is the purest well of experience from which a writer can draw.” – Patrick White
“It does no harm to repeat as often as you can: ‘without me the literary industry would not exist. The publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages – all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronised, put-down and under-paid person.’” - Doris Lessing
“‘I sometimes ask myself whether I enjoy writing. The answer is yes, but a qualified yes. I only enjoy it when it’s going well. Starting a new book is always hard work, and work that moreover for months feels pointless (why bother? why not do something else?) or ill-directed (why this subject? why not something more global, more domestic, less domestic?): I walk around, looking for plot, structure, characters, images, trying not to repeat or imitate or listen too much to the wrong voices. This is a dreary time, comfortless, irritable, unsatisfying. When the book begins to move, everything changes, and everything I see or hear or read seems to be part of, to contribute to the new pattern. This is exciting. It’s the only time when I forget time. Past the half way mark, a novel almost writes itself. Events beget events, characters insist on seeing one another again, and I just sit and transcribe. I get quite cheerful and communicative. A strange process …’ – Margaret Drabble
“Everywhere I go I am asked if the universities stifle writers. In my opinion they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor
”It seems to me that since I’ve had children, I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for awhile, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from. After all, who else in the world do you have to love, no matter what? My life seems more intricate. Also more dangerous.’ – Anne Tyler
”Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.’ - John Updike
“Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore, and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you produced a writer who can honestly say he was ever helped by the prissy carpings and condescensions of reviewers. I don’t mean to say that none of the professional critics are worth paying attention to – but few of the good ones review on a regular basis. Most of all, I believe in hardening yourself against opinion. I’ve had, and continue to receive, my full share of abuse, some of it extremely personal, but it doesn’t faze me any more. I can read the most outrageous libel about myself and never skip a pulse-beat.’ – Truman Capote
“As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool … yes, to be a fool, that perhaps requires the greatest courage.’ – Anne Sexton
‘I’m not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.’ – AN Wilson
‘I am constantly meeting ladies who say, ‘how lovely it must be to write’, as though one sat down at the escritoire after breakfast, and it poured out like a succession of bread and butter letters, instead of being dragged out, by tongs, a bloody mess, in the small hours.’ - Patrick White
‘And here I sit, like a weevil in a biscuit.’ - Virginia Woolf
‘Being a writer makes one a ghost before one’s time. The kind of ghost that likes a libation.’ – Sylvia Townsend Warner
