“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
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Norman Mailer (b. January 31): “Style is character.”
31 Jan
“A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad, undisciplined character… I think good style is a matter of rendering out of oneself all the cupidities, all the cripplings, all the vague desires. And then I think one has to develop one’s physical grace.”
~ Norman Mailer, b. 31 January 1923
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Edith Wharton (b. January 24): “Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed.”
24 Jan
“Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
~ Edith Wharton, b. 24 January 1862
Jay McInerney (b. January 13): “There aren’t many shy writers left.”
13 Jan
“There aren’t many shy writers left.”
~ Jay McInerney, b. 13 January 1955
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Ray Bradbury: “Writing is like sex…”
7 Dec
Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there’ll be no “charge” left. You can’t father children that way.
– Ray Bradbury
Roland Barthes (b. November 12): “Language is a skin” & other obsessions
12 Nov
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Roland Barthes (born 12 November 1915, died 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist and critic who influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.
Quotes on language:
- Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
- I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
- Take the gesture, the action of writing. I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens – I don’t know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them.
Neil Gaiman (b. November 10): “You get ideas from being bored” & other quotes on writing
10 Nov
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Neil Gaiman, born 10 November 1960, is an English author who writes short stories, novels, comic books, graphic novels and films. His novels include Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
Quotes on writing
- Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
- Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
- Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
- Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.
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
1 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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