Robert Bly
Author: cwq
“When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.”
Donna Tartt
“If you are destined to become a writer, you can’t help it. If you can help it, you aren’t destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn’t have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.”
Donald Harington
“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to ‘get in touch with your feelings,’ fine — talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down and then cut out the confusing parts.”
William Safire
“Keep a diary, but don’t just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end — as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It’s great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.”
John Berendt
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
Joseph Conrad
“I believe that my gift in this world is not that I’m smarter or more talented than anyone else: it’s that I had a singular goal. I don’t want other stuff: friends, kids, travel. What makes me happy is writing.”
Ann Patchett