Richard Ford
“Writing should … be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent … and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
Pico Iyer
“The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading.”
Pico Iyer
I write “Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.”
Robert Coover
“Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.”
Paul Auster
“The artist, like the God of the Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
James Joyce
“Above all, the listener should be able to understand the poem or the song, not be forced to unravel a complicated, self-indulgent puzzle. Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few.”
Lucinda Williams
…Ambrose marveled that he was now the world’s leading expert on Charles Billinghurst. “Now what I soon learned was, the reason for that was that nobody else cared about Charles A. Billinghurst. But I can make ’em care if I tell the story right.”
Stephen Ambrose