Stanley Kunitz
“I think that as a young poet I looked for what Keats called ‘a fine excess,’ but as an old poet I look for spareness and rigor and a world of compassion.”
Stanley Kunitz
“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”
David Sedaris
“It has always seemed to me that really artistic, truthful ambiguity — if we can use such a paradoxical phrase — is the most perfect form of expression… I would say ambiguity is the end product of avoiding superficial, pat truths.”
Stanley Kubrick
“The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.”
William Faulkner
“Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something where — if you missed it by age 19 — you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world — at any age. At least try.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
“Novelists – especially novelists who paint on a broad canvas – are generally not given to undue anxiety, I think. The task is so enormous that if we ever really thought about what we were letting ourselves in for, we’d never begin. Early on we learn to worry only about what we do today. If I get my two or three pages written on Monday my day’s work is done. It’s useless to worry about Friday or four years from Friday. Pages need our attention; books take care of themselves.”
Richard Russo
“A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.”
Junot Diaz