Charles Simic
“You can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”
Christopher Morley
“You choose to be a novelist, but you’re chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it’s a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate and secret of yourself to the world and not care, because you have to believe that what you have to say is important enough.”
May Sarton
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. […] Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”
Annie Dillard
“When I first started writing plays I couldn’t write good dialogue because I didn’t respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. The important thing is not to censor them. What they are talking about may not seem to have anything to do with what you as a writer are writing about but it does.”
August Wilson
“Frankly, there’s nothing wrong with sentiment. Sentimentality is very much in the eye of the beholder. And unless you’re writing with sentiment, you’re not writing at all. Your writing is cold and remote. It’s better to walk that line.”
Ted Kooser
“This writing business you have to accustom yourself to is about failing again and again, and to not let that hold you up because if you keep at it day, after day, after day, after day, eventually you’ll get better.”
Ted Kooser
“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying – only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald