Jonathon Winters
Quotes
“Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”
Walker Evans
“Writing a good essay isn’t that easy. You can’t do it with a pointing stick. I try to make a point obliquely, adroitly, and whenever possible, with humor. It must always be a surprise. The surprise is what makes people laugh.”
John Gould
“A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away. A critic looks at the finished product and ignores the rush of a river that went into the writing, which has nothing to do with the kind of temperate thoughts you have about it. If you can imagine the sheer bloody pleasure of having an idea and taking it! It’s one of the great pleasures in my life.”
Doris Lessing
“I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book – let him relate the events of his own Life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Keep on writing, no matter what! That’s the most important thing. As long as you have a job on hand that absorbs all your mental energy, you haven’t much worry to spare over other things. It serves as a suit of armor.”
Eugene O’Neill
“I am sure that in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt. It’s a sign, I suppose, of life’s decreasing livableness as life that people should feel it possible to make themselves felt in so few other ways. The non-essential writer never gets past that wish.”
Elizabeth Bowen