“I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.”
~ Luis Bunuel, b. 22 February 1900
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Archive | February, 2015
Richard North Patterson (b. Feb 22): “There’s a wonderful freedom to being a novelist.”
22 Feb
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Richard North Patterson, born 22 February 1947, is an American best-selling fiction writer of 22 novels. Before he wrote full time, he studied creative writing at the University of Alabama. He was also a lawyer. He served as Ohio’s Assistant Attorney General, a Watergate prosecutor, and as an attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission. His first novel, The Lasko Tangent, won an Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1979.
10 quotes on writing:
- The business of writing is empathising with situations that aren’t your own.
- Writing seems like the only job where what you think and feel really matters.
- I was 29 when I wrote my first novel. But I was 45 when I quit for good. I was a 16-year overnight success.
- There is a wonderful freedom to being a novelist – it’s self-assigned work. For someone who’s curious by nature, it’s a perfect job.
- The manuscript you submit [should not] contain any flaws that you can identify – it is up to the writer to do the work, rather than counting on some stranger in Manhattan to do it for him.
- Writing is re-writing. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospect of never publishing.
- Trial lawyers have to be story tellers. They have to arrange complex facts in attractive narratives; grasp character; understand judges, juries, make clients appealing, understandable. They do have a lot of stories to tell – vivid and interesting things to talk about.
- Write what you care about and understand. Writers should never try to outguess the marketplace in search of a saleable idea; the simple truth is that all good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write one that people like you will enjoy.
- Monday through Friday, I get up at five, read The New York Times and begin writing by seven. I work with an outline of the chapter or scenes from each day and typically finish with original writing by noon. Throughout the afternoon my assistant and I work the draft over until it’s as good as it can be. Typically we’re not happy until late afternoon.
- The writer must always leave room for the characters to grow and change. If you move your characters from plot point to plot point, like painting by the numbers, they often remain stick figures. They will never take on a life of their own. The most exciting thing is when you find a character doing something surprising or unplanned. Like a character saying to me: “Hey, Richard, you may think I work for you, but I don’t. I’m my own person.”
Drew Barrymore (b. Feb 22): “Love is the hardest habit to break.”
22 Feb
“Love is the hardest habit to break, and the most difficult to satisfy.”
~ Drew Barrymore, b. 22 February 1975
Chuck Palahniuk (b. Feb 21): “We must never, ever be boring.”
21 Feb
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Chuck Palahniuk, born 21 February 1962, is an American novelist who describes his work as ‘transgressional fiction’. He is best known as the author of the award-winning novel Fight Club, which also was made into a feature film.
Quotes on Life & Writing:
- All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
- It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one.creation,
- You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
- I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.
- Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.
- I write compulsively. I’ve got so many ideas, and I love to do it so much, I can’t not do it. I write the way some people do drugs.
- What I’m always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of camp fires and fireplaces – the ghost stories that engaged us.
- Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.
- You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
- I always thought I’d write when I retired – when I turned 65. But by the time I was 33, to tell you the truth, I was a little bored with drugs and sex, and I thought I’d do the writing thing.
- I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
- The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
Anais Nin (b. Feb 21): “If you don’t cry out or sing, then don’t write.”
21 Feb
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”
~ Anais Nin, b. 21 February 1903
Ansel Adams (b. Feb 20): “A photograph can hold just as much as we put into it…”
20 Feb
“We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.”
~ Ansel Adams, b. 20 February 1902
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Toni Morrison (b. Feb 18): “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self… is the test of their power.”
18 Feb
“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
~ Toni Morrison, b. 18 February 1931
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Yoko Ono (b. Feb 18): “Everybody’s an artist.”
18 Feb
“Everybody’s an artist. Everybody’s God. It’s just that they’re inhibited.”
~ Yoko Ono, b. 18 February 1933
Michael Jordan (b. Feb 17): “The game is my wife…”
17 Feb
“The game is my wife. It demands loyalty and responsibility, and it gives me back fulfillment and peace.”
~ Michael Jordan, b. 17 February 1963
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