EMILY DICKINSON
“Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”
RAY BRADBURY
“You are working in clay, not marble, on paper, not eternal bronze; let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.”
JACQUES BARZUN
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly— and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
“You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: What we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb, and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.”
Larry McMurtry
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
Joseph Brodsky
I think that if I learned anything, it’s that you can feel completely despairing and hopeless and in over your head and lost and incompetent in the course of writing a book, but that doesn’t mean all those things are true. You can fight your way through those periods to a new appreciation of what you’re doing and to a firmer grip on the material.
Michael Chabon
“A poet’s job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.”
Jane Kenyon