Steven Pressfield
Quotes
“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”
Ring Lardner
“As embarrassing as that word is – ‘inspiration’ – I do think it corresponds to my experience. A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.”
Richard Wilbur
“Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. . The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.”
David Foster Wallace
“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
Anaïs Nin
“Either you want to tell a story or you don’t. Do you want to draw attention to yourself and your own writing and your beautiful style or do you want to be invisible and let the story and the characters take over for the reader. That’s what it comes down to for me.”
George Pelecanos
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Bertolt Brecht
“Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.”
Alice Walker