Eric Partridge
“The story is the first thing and the last thing.”
Norman Rockwell
“Writing or making anything – a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake – has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.”
Sharon Olds
Whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page.”
Sharon Olds
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Elmore Leonard
“I can hardly think of anything that pleases me more than writing a sentence that surprises me.”
Ann Beattie
“All literature is protest. You can’t name a single novel that isn’t protest.”
Richard Wright
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
Ernest Hemingway