“The great crime novelist Raymond Chandler set aside four hours each day where he had to be completely alone. During his solitude he gave himself permission not to write if he wasn’t feeling inspired. However, if he chose not to write, he had to sit in his writing chair and do nothing. Eventually, Chandler would become so goddamn bored doing nothing, he’d to write.”
Cole Schafer
“In writing your journal give primary attention to detail; for it is detail which organizes and preserves experience for your future self or some other reader. General statements like ‘We had a wonderful time’ or ‘It was a dismal morning’ make a mockery of the whole procedure, for they evaluate experience without recreating it. I kept long journals from ages ten to twenty-two, chronicling events and describing emotional states, but again and again missing the physical immediacy of experience, the tiny hooks by which experience could have been caught and held. I failed to record how we looked, what we saw, the minor eccentricities of circumstance which gave special character to a day. I ignored these elements not only through lack of training but through misplaced priorities: I mistakingly assumed that one could discuss the heart of things without discussing the surface of things.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 180)
“Achievements like the writing of books, the painting of pictures, and indeed all long and cumulative indivisual efforts, are greater than the individuals who produce them, if we view these individuals at any single point in time. For no one can in a single moment recall the multitude of shapes his mind took during the course of the work, or revive the various intensisties of passion and calm which injected themselves into its production, or glow with the incremental power built up by weeks or months of care. The work resembels not the partial man, alone within the minutes, but the whole man, incorporate in time.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 122)
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
Anne Lamott
“Writing is a byproduct of hours and hours of reading, researching, thinking and making my notecards. When a day’s writing goes well, it’s got little to do with that day at all. It’s actually a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking. Every passage and page has a prologue titled Preparation.”
Ryan Holiday
“When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
Ernest Hemingway, via A Moveable Feast
“Some days I show up and do the best writing of my life. Other days, many days, I show up and do writing that is underwhelmingly average (and reeking of a few typos). The lesson I hope you walk away with in watching me work is not that I am flawless, but that a deeply flawed individual can achieve something that transcends his lackluster abilities by simply showing up, again and again, over the course of a lifetime.”
Cole Schafer
Five-Year Memory Book
Why We ♥ It: The simple commitment of just One Line a Day is manageable for everyone. Plus, each page includes an entry for five successive years, allowing you to revisit previous thoughts and memories on specific days of the year. Uniquely rewarding, simple to complete, and presented in an inviting and modern package, this tactile journal will become a treasure trove of memories to cherish forever.
“I share with painters the desire
Nikki Giovanni, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
To put a three-dimensional picture
On a One-dimensional surface.”
“The truth was that practicing writing meant practicing sitting down, sitting still, and my body did not ever want to be still. When it had to be still, all it wanted to do was imagine dunking with two hands or kissing a girl who loved me. Sitting still, just as much as any other part of writing, took practice. Most days, my body did not want to practice, but I convinced it that sitting still and writing were a path to memory.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 86)
“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 86)
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“For the last ten years now I have kept a journal, using a counterintuitive yet effective method. It is simply this: I write less than I feel like writing. Typically, When people start to keep a journal they write pages the first day. Then by the second day the prospect of writing so much is daunting, and they procrastinate or abandon the exercise. So apply the principle of ‘less but better’ to your journal. Restrain yourself from writing more until daily journaling has become a habit.”
Greg McKeown, Essentialism (Page 78)