Quotations

Here is a list of quotations I have found useful in my work with students. Feel free to add others you may have come upon.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do. (Donald Barthelme)

Is writing more like prayer, or more like life itself, or a little like both? I am not sure. They all seem remarkably akin to me. They all exact something from us, but it is hard--maybe impossible--to know in advance what that something is...writing, prayer, life: they meld and fuse for me, although if I had to choose, I would surely dispense with the writing before the other two. But so far I have not been required to make that choice, so it is hard to think of any one of them without the other two peeping in from the wings. Consequently, I have come to think of writing as a kind of spiritual discipline. (Harvey Cox)

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I want to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescences, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways: Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressure and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions. (Don DeLillo)

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. ... Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. (E. L. Doctorow)

At the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanading as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul. (Andre Dubus)

As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity. (Flaubert)

Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them. (Carlos Fuentes)

I tell them to get an exercise book.. If you haven’t got any ideas just copy out something that you’ve liked in someone else’s book… But copying is what artists do; it’s often how they start, I think. And, I know (if) because I still use a pen quite a lot, I know that if I copy something out, there’s a sense that, you’re sensing with, sensing with your body the sort of joints of the sentence and how the, the weight of the sentence is gathered and carried and how it’s kind of slung from one end of the sentence structure to another. That always gives me a great deal of pleasure. You have to write slowly, and you can see how it’s done, even though you don’t know how to do it — but you can — you can see the joints of the thing. (Helen Garner)

Things come together–or they seem to, which is enough. If I am patient, if I stay with a poem, things will come together.... “The Black-Faced Sheep” took between two and three years, and more than a hundred drafts. Lately, poems have not been coming so quickly. (Donald Hall)

Revision is the hope you hold out for yourself to make something beautiful tomorrow though you didn’t quite manage it today. Revision is democracy’s literary method, the tool that allows an ordinary person to aspire to extraordinary achievement. (David Huddle)

You can learn to love tinkering with drafts of poems till a warm hand from somewhere above you reaches down, unscrews the top of your head, and drops in a solution that blows your ears off. Sure, there asre plenty of days when nothing good happens, days when every word you write seems silly and shallow, when your revisions seem to be draffing your poems in the wrong direction. But you need to be there writing and waiting, as a hunter might say, for that hour when at last the ducks come flying in. (Ted Kooser)

Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages. As a young writer I figured that if anybody knew about short stories, it was Chekhov, so I tried taking his advice. I really hoped he was wrong, but of course he was right. It depends on the length of the story, naturally; if it's very short, you can only throw out the first three praragraphs. But there are few first drafts to which Chekhov's Razor doesn't apply. Starting a story, we all tend to circle around, explain a lot of stuff, set things up that don't need to be set up. Then we find our way and get going, and the story begins ... very often just about on page 3. In revision, as a rough rule, if the beginning can be cut, cut it. And if any passsage sticks out in some way, leaves the main trajectory, could possibly come out — take it out and see what the story looks like that way. Often a cut that seemed sure to leave a terrible hole joins up without a seam. It's as if the story, the work itself, has a shape it's trying to achieve, and will take that shape if you'll only clear away the verbiage. (Ursula LeGuin)

The difference between any genre or entertainment writing and art is that the entertainment writer knows before the first word is written what effect it will have on the audience or what ideas or thoughts the audience will take from it. In science fiction, there's a vision of society, a political implication, a sociological implication; they create a work to make a political or philosophical point, and/or they write to produce an effect of escapism, to take the reader away. Either way, there is a preconceived end effect or message, and the object is constructed to achieve it. That is the entertainment writer's process. The literary artist works from the other end. She does not know, before the work begins, what it is she sees about the world. She has in her unconscious, in her dreamspace, an inchoate sense of order behind the apparent chaos of life, and she must create this object in order to understand what that order is. It's as much an act of exploration as it is an act of expression. (Robert Olen Butler)

Write from what you know into what you don't know. (Grace Paley)

It matters what words we choose, what voice we speak in, what tone we take. It matters for the quality of our own thought, and for the quality of our invitation to our readers. The intellectual and aesthetic choices we make when we write are also moral, spiritual choices that can hold open a door for another to enter, or pull that door shut; that can sharpen our thinking or allow it to recline on a comfortable bed of jargon; that can form us in generosity and humility or in condescension and disdain. (Stephanie Paulsell)

We all live rather prescribed and narrow lives. I'm just this one white guy, 60-something years old. I'll never be anything else except older. I've got one set of kids. I've got one wife. That's it for me. But then there's this great, great library of experiences that's housed in the liberal arts. Fictional worlds created that I can put on like this gown or coat, eyes I can borrow through which to see the world. I can be a black housewife. I can be a king. I can be a 19th-century fur trapper. I can be a C.I.A. spy. I can be a warrior. I can learn what it feels like to be tried and convicted, to confess, to win the beautiful girl, lose the beautiful girl. It's a way of understanding the world that functions beyond intellect and it teaches and touches through feeling and experience even when the experience is purely that of the imagination. Compassion finally is the great gift of literature. Fiction, and by that I mean the aesthetic creation of all artificial worlds, must persuade you to interpret the world through compassion. (Sydney Pollack)

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin wtih. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it-- that’s something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book. (Philip Roth)

Sometimes you get a line, a phrase, sometimes you’re crying, or it’s the curve of a chair that hurts you and you don’t know why, or sometimes you just want to write a poem, and you don’t know what it’s about. I will fool around on the typewriter. It might take me ten pages of nothing, of terrible writing, and then I’ll get a line, and I’ll think, “That’s what I mean!” What you’re doing is hunting for what you mean, what you’re trying to say. You don’t know when you start. (Anne Sexton)

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be, a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. . . . Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. . . . A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous “I don't know.” (Wislawa Szymborska)