Zadie Smith
Quotes
“You never know what you’ll want to write until it starts writing itself in your head.”
Jill Ker Conway
“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”
Jennifer Egan
“Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts music in our ears.”
Charles Wright
“Writers like me, you see, lead a surrogate life. We don’t really have a life of our own. I’m only happy when I’m writing about something or somebody else — perhaps that’s part of the problem of not being better known than I am — I live through my books, in a way. No personality of my own.”
Brian Moore
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different worlds on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
Annie Proulx
“I’ve known writers – I think it’s true also of other artists – who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.”
Wendell Berry
“Art is not an escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.”
Robert Hayden