“In the end, without skill or talent, I’ve given myself over entirely to poetry. Po Chü-i labored at it until he nearly burst. Tu Fu starved rather than abandon it. Neither my intelligence nor my writing is comparable to such men. Nevertheless, in the end, we all live in phantom huts.”
Bashō, Narrow Road To The Interior (Page 182)
“The attitude is paradoxical: the Zen poet believes the real experience of poetry lies somewhere beyond the words themselves but, like a good Confucian, believes simultaneously that only the perfect word perfectly placed has the power to reveal the authentic experience of the poem.”
Sam Hamill, Narrow Road To The Interior (Page XVIII)
“When I started writing this piece, I didn’t know where exactly I was going to land. I never know where I’m going to land when I start writing something. In fact, I’m deeply skeptical of any writer that claims they have the precognition to know where they’re going to end up before they’ve even started.”
Cole Schafer
“If you want to be a good writer, if you want to be a writer that has something to say, you can’t be afraid to write your truths, even if these truths are going to hurt some people around you. Good writers hurt their friends from time to time, this is the cost of doing business, this is the cost of writing truths.”
Cole Schafer
“If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself. I am the only real truth I know.”
Jean Rhys, via Sunbeams (Page 159)
“I’d always imagined myself as the kind of writer who would help other people tell their stories, but increasingly I found myself gravitating toward the first person. Illness had turned my gaze inward.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 107)
“People often respond to the news of tragedy with ‘words fail,’ but words did not fail me that day, or the next, or thereafter—they poured out of me, first cautiously, then exuberantly, my mind awakening as if from a long slumber, thoughts tumbling out faster than my pen could keep up.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 106)
“It is more worthy in the eyes of God… if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.”
Garrison Keillor, via Sunbeams (Page 134)
“As far as the writing itself is concerned it takes next to no time at all. Much too much is written every day of our lives. We are overwhelmed by it. But when at times we see through the welter of evasive or interested patter, when by chance we penetrate to some moving detail of a life, there is always time to bang out a few pages. The thing isn’t to find the time for it—we waste hours every day doing absolutely nothing at all—the difficulty is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight. This is where the difficulty lies. We are lucky when that underground current can be tapped and the secret spring of all our lives will send up its pure water. It seldom happens. A thousand trivialities push themselves to the front, our lying habits of everyday speech and thought are foremost, telling us that that is what ‘they’ want to hear. Tell them something else.”
William Carlos Williams, via Sunbeams (Page 107)
“I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics — New York critics as a rule — who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.”
Maya Angelou, The Paris Review Interviews: Volume IV
“Don’t overdress your thought in fine language.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 115)
“Whatever the next thing is I write, it’s got to be even more naked than the last.”
Harold Pinter, via Sunbeams (Page 50)
“There’s no one way—there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”
Bernard Malamud, via Daily Rituals (Page 233)
“Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night—six hours, seven, maybe even the recommended eight—so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.”
Stephen King, via Daily Rituals (Page 224)