John McPhee (On having written more than 25 books, though he rarely writes more than 500 words a day.)
Quotes
“There is a romantic notion to writing a novel, especially when you are starting it. You are embarking on this incredibly exciting journey, and you’re going to write your first novel, you’re going to write a book. Until you’re about 50 pages into it, and that romance wears off, and then you’re left with a very stark reality of having to write the rest of this thing […] A lot of 50-page unfinished novels are sitting in a lot of drawers across this country. Well, what it takes at that point is discipline […] You have to be more stubborn than the manuscript, and you have to punch in and punch out every day, regardless of whether it’s going well, regardless of whether it’s going badly […] It’s largely an act of perseverance […] The story really wants to defeat you, and you just have to be more mulish than the story.”
Khaled Hosseini
“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book, and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”
Tom Wolfe
“Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing – I suppose that’s what a vocation means – at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.”
Robert Lowell
“Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.”
Howard Nemerov
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
W. H. Auden
“Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.”
Alice Walker
“Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.”
Robert Coover