“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.”
~ Anne Sexton, b. 9 November 1928
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Kazuo Ishiguro (b. November 8): “Memory is central for me” & other quotes on writing
8 Nov
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Kazuo Ishiguro, born 8 November 1954, is a Japanese-born British novelist. He’s one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world. He’s been nominated for the Man Booker Prize four times, and won in 1989 for The Remains of the Day.
Quotes on writing
- Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
- As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
- I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
- I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
- I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.
- I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
- Screenplays I didn’t really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
- What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer’s life with the writing. I think that’s something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
- I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write-with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.
The world’s most interesting astrologer: joy of sects
8 Nov
Alan Annand is an astrologer and writer of crime fiction, including his New Age Noir series featuring astrologer and palmist Axel Crowe, a criminal profiler whom one reviewer dubbed “Sherlock Holmes with a horoscope.”
Read reviews for Scorpio Rising (#1), buy it or Felonious Monk (#2) at:
Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Flipkart, Kobo & Smashwords
Bonnie Raitt (b. November 8): “Religion is for people scared to go to hell…”
8 Nov
“Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.”
~ Bonnie Raitt, b. 8 November 1949
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Albert Camus (b. November 7): “We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages…”
7 Nov
“We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.”
~ Albert Camus, b. 7 November 1913
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James Jones (b. November 6): “I write to reach eternity” & other quotes on writing
6 Nov
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James Jones (born 6 November 1921, died 9 May 1977) was an American author who won the 1952 National Book Award for his first published novel, From Here to Eternity, adapted for film and made into a television series a generation later.
Quotes on writing:
- I write to reach eternity.
- Old soldiers never die, they write novels.
- Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.
- The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism.
- You have to really work at it to write. I guess there has to be talent first; but even with talent you still have to work at it.
- I believe it is good for an American writer to get outside his country — outside his continent — and see it from a vantage point outside its pervading emotional climate.
- I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.
Yiyun Li (b. November 4): “One should be able to imagine being somebody else”
4 Nov
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Yiyun Li, born 4 November 1972, is a Chinese American writer whose works include the short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and the novel The Vagrants.
Quotes on writing:
- I think I’m just writing about human nature and it just so happens that my characters are Chinese.
- To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
- What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.
- Oftentimes if a story didn’t work, I would rescue one character or two characters—or one paragraph—from the story and start all over. Which actually was very efficient for me, I think. You can spend so much time revising.
- When I first started writing, I thought a lot about the shape of the stories—do you have a triangle or a rectangle, or do you have a mirror image? Is one character a mirror image of the other? What variation did you do with the characters to make that interesting?
- I wish people would ask me about the importance of the imagination. I really believe that one should be able to imagine being somebody else. This is important for writers, but it’s also important for readers, and for all human beings to be able to imagine being somebody else.
Taiye Selasi (b. November 2): “I write essays to clear my mind, fiction to open my heart.”
2 Nov
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Taiye Selasi, born 2 November 1979, is an English writer born to Nigerian and Ghanaian parents. She has published three collections of short stories and the novel, Ghana Must Go.
Quotes on writing:
- I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
- As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.
- The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.
- As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.
- I’ve written fiction for as long as I can remember; it’s always been my preferred form of play.
- I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.
- That’s what makes writer’s block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That’s beyond frightening.
- So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
- I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are inaccurate, but that they’re incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn’t that it’s inaccurate, it’s that it’s incomplete.
Lee Smith (b. November 1): “We have to pay attention” & other quotes on writing
2 Nov
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Lee Smith, born 1 November 1944, is an American fiction author whose writing has won the O. Henry Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.
Quotes on writing:
- I like books. I like to read for four hours at a stretch.
- If you’re writing, you’re always living your life in a very attentive manner, because you have to.
- The practice of writing itself is a way of staying in touch with the deeper, more meaningful self and the experience of writing.
- We have to pay attention. It’s a lifetime of paying attention and of listening and looking and seeing images and hearing stories and noticing things.
- When you’re just flat-out writing, it’s very much like prayer. You’re totally out of yourself, and you come back to yourself with this sort of feeling that you don’t get from anything else.
- I think writing has always had a powerful corrective influence and possibility. We have to write about what’s good, and we also have to write about parts of our culture that are not good, that are not working out. I think it takes a new eye.
- My advice for young writers is just do it. Don’t wait for some ideal point in your life when you will finally have “time to write.” No sane person ever has time to write. Don’t clean the bathroom, don’t paint the hall. Write. Claim your time. And remember that a writer is a person who is writing, not a person who is publishing.
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