Katherine Anne Porter
“When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.”
Kathleen Jamie
“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide?”
Walker Percy
“It is possible . . . that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.”
Walker Percy
“A good novel is possible only after one has given up and let go.”
Walker Percy
“I sit down to work each morning at 9 a.m., and the muse has learnt to be on time.”
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”
Orson Welles
I like the idea that fiction is a license to lie. It takes the mundane and constructs something interesting out of it. Fiction is usually a perversion of what happened into what could happen. Fiction converts ordinary life into hard gossip.”
Padgett Powell