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Author Quotes "I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It's the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what's going to happen three hours from now."
"Never mind the rejections, the discouragement, the voices of ridicule (there can be those, too). Work and wait and learn, and that train will come by. If you give up, you’ll never have a chance to climb aboard. "
"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."
"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. "
"Don't write what you know; write what you fear."
"We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying ... what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light."
"A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave."
"I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. ...Many lives don't allow that, the good fortune of being able to work at it, and try, and keep trying."
"Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."
"The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?"
"Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, why not carry those two inflated pig bladders labeled Zest and Gusto."
"Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than we are with winning. Winning is great, but it isn't funny."
"I counted the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years, and got a total of fifty... It was a good background for a novelist, but not for anything else I can think of."
"Let us read and let us dance -- two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."
"Writers are the people who kept getting marked down in kindergarten for 'doesn't play well with others.' "
"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
"To go against the thinking of others when your thinking leads you to another place is an act of personal heroism. It is the courage of individuals that make all the difference, not the complacency of the timid." "To write you have to have stories you want to tell, you have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard."
"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."
"I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances. It's lucky I do it on paper. Probably I would be schizophrenic -- and six times divorced -- if I weren't writing."
"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."
"The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading."
"The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows."
"Me and a book is a party. Me and a book and a cup of coffee is an orgy."
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
"All sorrows can be borne, if you put them into a story."
"[Language] is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination."
"Writing became a way for me to talk about myself--or a character--in a really personal, surprising manner without any embarrassment. I was brought up to be an incredibly nice person, but not everything I wanted to say was nice."
"There's no such thing as a born writer. It's a skill you've got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter."
"...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language... Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer..."
"Talent is cute and it's nice to have, but I'd bet on the [writing] student who's a hard worker."
"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."
"There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do."
"The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style."
"Of the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable."
"The writer must be willing, above everything else, to take chances, to risk making a fool of himself -- or even to risk revealing the fact that he is a fool." "Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work." "The important thing to remember is that if as you write, you start to veer off course, keep veering. You never want to make your plans more important than your instincts." "You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth." "I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you -- it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists." "The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent guilt-ridden one –- or both. Usually both." "There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt." "Try to talk yourself out of [writing]. As a life, it's much too solitary, it makes you obsessive, the rewards seem to be much too inward for most people, and too much rides on luck. Other than that, it's great." "[Writing is] nervous work. The state that you need to write is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of." "I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe." "A writer writes what other people only think." "Success is falling nine times and getting up ten." "It’s not writer’s block, it’s idea block."
"The literature of women’s lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale. They resist captivity. They get up and go. They seek better worlds."
"You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down." "Never, never, never give up." "The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass." "You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me." "The only person you should ever compete against is yourself. It's the only way you'll ever really win." "It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world." "I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago." "I always imagined paradise to be a sort of library."
"Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. "
“A writer makes a contract with himself that he’s going to write, and only he can honor that contract by writing every day, honing his craft, and becoming the best writer he can be. A writer mentors himself.”
“The very fact that you fear something is solid evidence that it is not happening.”
"What we ... refer to confidently as memory ... is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling."
"The classical detective story affirms our belief that we live in a rational and generally benevolent universe."
"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."
"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."
"Once you've got the How, the Why drives it home."
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
"Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."
"Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them."
"The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth."
"Nothing is safe, but nothing is hopeless either."
"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very', otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. "
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."
"Writing has ... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer."
"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these."
"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
“I like nonsense. It wakes up the brain cells.”
“The art of writing is what you get to do once you become familiar with the craft.”
“Writing is not an efficiency art.”
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
"Year by year the complexities of this spinning world grow more bewildering and so each year we need all the more to seek peace and comfort in the joyful simplicities."
"Life is lonely; it is less so if one reads."
“Why you want to write anything is one of the most important questions writers can ask themselves.”
"A writer is committed to trying to make sense of life. It's a search. So there is that commitment first of all: the commitment to the honesty and determination to go as deeply into things as possible, and to dredge up what little bit of truth you with your talent can then express."
"If you can’t be brave, be determined, and you’ll end up in the same place."
"Art is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having lived in a difficult and sometimes chaotic world."
"Don't write until you're 25. Don't write for the high school yearbook. Don't write for the college literary magazine. Don't write that stuff—you never had any experiences, you don't know anything, just shut up."
"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend."
"Authors are inveterate worriers."
"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."
"If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become president."
"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners no matter what fork you use."
"I didn't want to be a writer when I was in high school; all I remember wanting to be was shorter."
“Never [let] the reader get too comfortable. That's some seriously great advice, especially in the suspense/crime genre, because the moment you let the reader relax, that gives him/her an excuse to close your book.”
"To be an artist means never to avert your eyes. "
"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
"I’m going to dance until I can’t.”
"A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.”
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
"I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate."
"If you don't love life you can't enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes."
"I am wary of a lot of things, such as ... time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants ... pageants, progress, and manifest destiny."
"Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use."
"We [humans] are the species that clamors to be lied to."
"One-half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it."
"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. "
"You write and then you erase. You call that a profession?"
"Writing is thinking. Writing well is thinking clearly.”
"The life of the creative man is led, directed, and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."
"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy."
"Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball."
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
"I start with people, and then I find out what the plot is about."
"Writing became a way for me to talk about myself--or a character--in a really personal, surprising manner without any embarrassment. I was brought up to be an incredibly nice person, but not everything I wanted to say was nice."
"I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around."
"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."
"A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt."
"One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth."
"What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers."
"People want to know, but they don’t want to learn."
"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."
"If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. [But] a writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes."
"I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live."
"If you get writer’s block, just lower your standards."
"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
"One great use of words is to hide our thoughts."
"What is reading, but silent conversation."
"I'd like to retire...and do nothing, or nothing much, forever...look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light."
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
"If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, without hard labour, and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!"
"I am still pegging away at my writing. The road of literature is at first a very slow one, but I have made a good deal of progress since this time last year and I mean to work patiently on until I win -- as I believe I shall."
"One can acquire everything in solitude except character."
"I think all readers, young and old, in any place or time, want to be told a story, the thousand variations of ‘Once upon a time...’"
"I have drawers in my mind, so many drawers. I have hundreds of materials in these drawers. I take out the images and memories that I need."
"Writing is just thinking through my fingers."
"By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life."
"When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil."
"While writers dearly love to work, they stand with parsons and painters and philosophers in loving just as dearly to be paid for it."
"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself." "Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember." "The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose." "A writer's like anybody else except when he's writing."
"If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
"Write like your parents are dead."
"What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell."
"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."
"I think [as a writer] you have to take your work from your life, but people live intense lives in all sorts of unlikely places . . . You can write a perfectly powerful novel about working in a shoe store. You don't have to shoot lions in Africa . . . Desperation is universal."
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
"If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself. It must go out from yourself. I don’t see what else you can do. I am the only real truth I know."
"I write of the wish that comes true -- for some reason, a terrifying concept."
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
"...never care if you are believed or not."
"There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."
“The genius of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.” "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."
"All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many period of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all."
"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."
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
"We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates."
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