All Quotes By Tag: On-writing

“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”

“V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.’ Notice the ‘glimpse’ part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we’re lucky — that word again — have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer’s task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He’ll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things — like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.”

“The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)”

“Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason — if the worlds are in any way blurred — the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing ‘weak specification’.”

“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

“It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things– a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring– with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine– the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.”

“Never put off writing until you are better at it.”

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”

“Write to your fear.”

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!”

“All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, ‘Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”

“A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.”

“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.”

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”