All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.”

“A book is never, ever finished. You simply get to a point where you and your editor are reasonably happy with how it is and you go with that. Left to our own devices, a writer would endlessly fiddle with a book, changing little thing after little thing.”

“I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.”

“A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader’s trust”

“(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements–abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out…In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost.”

“Writing is more than a gift. It is a struggle that blesses those who see it through to the end.”

“What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was ‘perhaps.”

“There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn’t go away is the one to pay attention to.”

“My job is to inspire others to live full lives. Whether I do that through my writing or my actions are one in the same.”

“In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one’s surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.”

“I enjoy writing, I enjoy my house, my family and, more than anything I enjoy the feeling of seeing each day used to the full to actually produce something. The end.”

“No, she laughed.” How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.”

“At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.”

“Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.”

“W jakimś sensie takie osoby jak ona, te, które władają piórem, bywają niebezpieczne. Narzuca się od razu podejrzenie fałszu – że taka osoba nie jest sobą, tylko okiem, które bezustannie patrzy, a to, co widzi, zamienia w zdania; w ten sposób okrawa rzeczywistość ze wszystkiego, co w niej najważniejsze, z niewyrażalności.”