Quotes
Saul Bellow
A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
ON MEMOIR:
The following of … thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.
Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context of circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.
Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.
Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
Richard White, from Remembering Ahanagran
What any of us know of our births, we learn from others. It is a beginning we ourselves cannot recall, so we commit the story to memory. We claim it and incorporate it into our story of ourselves. We thus begin the story of our lives with an intimate event that we can only know second hand. And so the confusion of history and memory begins.
ON ART & PROCESS:
William Stafford:
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
Commit yourself to the process, NOT the project. Don’t be afraid to write badly, everyone does. Invest yourself in the lifestyle .. NOT in the particular piece of work.
Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline – with a little help from caffeine.
The piece of work has to be proportionate to its drama, to its suggestiveness, to its ideas. There's a power that can sometimes be gained by taking things out. But more often than not, to tell you the truth, I find myself telling my students that they've underwritten. There will be specific scenes that will be overwritten. But more often than not, the story itself is underwritten. The characters haven't been given enough room to grow. The whole line of events hasn't been made clear. Later on, when that's out there, then you kind of find things within the sentences and within the scenes to cut down.
For a young writer, the best thing to do is get it out. I certainly have to. I have to write at length before I can write in brief. I have to see what the terrain is before I single out that telling moment, that telling detail and cut away the others. But I have to write the others to get to that one. So you don't want to start off in a stingy way when you write. You want to be extravagant. You know you're going to rewrite anyway, so what the hell? Pump it out, see what comes. And be free in your composition. You can be an editor later. But you don't want to be an editor and a writer at the same time, when you're doing that first draft. I think that's a mistake.
A lot of writing is an acquired schizophrenia. You have to really allow yourself to be a kind of egomaniac when you first start a story or a piece of work. Everything you write has to seem good to you and just get it out. Let it inspire you to the next sentence and the next scene and the next character. And in that way, you discover what your story is. But if you're looking over your own shoulder all the time, crossing every other sentence out, and holding every other word up to the light as you're composing, that can lead you to become kind of constipated as a writer. Later on, you have to look at your work with a very cold eye, as if you were editing someone else's. But in that first blush, why not enjoy it?
Wynton Marsalis: 12 steps for making art (from a PBS production about teaching art to children)
1. seek instruction
2. make a schedule
3. set goals – chart development
4. focus while practicing
5. relax, practice slowly, you can’t be in a hurry if you’re gonna get better
6. practice the things you can’t do – don’t rehearse your instincts
7. always give maximum expression – invest
8. don’t be too hard on yourself
9. don’t show off
10. think for yourself
11. be optimistic
12. look for connections to other things
Igor Stravinsky from Poetics of Music
We have a duty towards music; namely to invent it. …Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality; whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out.
Very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something… They are interested in being a writer, not writing… If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you. I feel that the external habits of the writer will be guided by his common sense or his lack of it and by his personal circumstances; and that these will seldom be alike in two cases. What interests the serious writer is not external habits but what Maritain calls, “the habit of art”; and he explains that “habit” in this sense means a certain quality or virtue of the mind.
What connects “influence” and “preference” is re-reading. When you read the same books over and over again, something works its way into your sensibility.
I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better be real enough that you can smell his breath.
Nothing is less real than realism. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meanings of things.
You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of the problem and the correct formulation of the problem. Not a single problem is resolved in Anna Karenina, or Onegin, but they satisfy you completely because all the problems in them are formulated correctly.
Elmore Leonard, Jr.
I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Pablo Picasso
Once I drew like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like children.
Writing is a difficult lonely endeavor, and every writer is a perpetual beginner. Therefore, don’t be ungenerous with another person’s attempts. Such an act will only reflect on you.
W.H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand from On Aesthetics
Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
Good taste is much more a matter of discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste feels compelled to exclude, it is with regret, not pleasure.
The surest sign that a person has a genuine taste of their own is that they are uncertain of it.
Why good literary critics are rare: it’s hard for them to realize that A’s work is more important that anything they can say about it. What is the function of the critic?
- introduce me to authors of which I was hitherto unaware
- convince me I have undervalued an author or work because I had not read them carefully enough
- give a reading of a work which increases my understanding of it
- throw light on the process of artistic making
E.M. Forster
The first test of the novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else we cannot define.
Howard Norman, on Inuit folk tales
The historical, let alone emotional, credibility of these folk tales comes from the fact that they are full of people who cannot “help themselves.” Characters act badly, murder people… but Inuit folk tales are also about people who bring bad luck on themselves. For instance, I like to think about people who, already living in remote circumstances, through their behavior make themselves even more remote.
Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I’m still trying to educate myself. I don’t think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can’t do.
Randell Jarrell on the definition of a novel
A prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.
Practice is the first sign of morality in a musician.
Joy Williams
The writer trusts nothing she writes--it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
A writer starts out . . . wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough. . . . Writers end up writing stories--or rather, stories' shadows--and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
Ira Glass (host of This American Life)
For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It’s a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new.
John Fowles
Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
Georges Braque
There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
Octavio Paz
Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life.
Kent Haruf (on the relationship between success and process)
My desire is to be anonymous, isolated, quiet, peaceful, and concentrated.
Theodore Roethke
Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.
Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.
E.L. Docotorow
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing--none of that is writing. Writing is writing. 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.
Virginia Woolf
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Stewart O'Nan
It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.