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

By Loa Iok-sin  /  Staff Reporter  Taipei Times

Demonstrators carry signs in the form of robots at a rally in downtown Taipei yesterday demanding legislation for weekly days off for migrant domestic workers.

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