I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing—tightrope walking comes immediately to mind—but it’s difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot.
CALVIN TRILLIN
The process of writing is a process of inner expansion and reduction. It’s like an accordion: You open it and then you bring it back, hoping that additional sound—a new clarity—may come out. It’s all for clarity.
JERZY KOSINSKI
Begin with something interesting rather than beginning with something boring; begin with action rather than beginning with background information; speak about the characters after they have appeared rather than having them appear after having spoken about them.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, père
Examine what happens when you read. Young writers tend to forget or ignore what’s actually going on when they’re reading. Which is to say, when one reads, one has oral and visual hallucinations and it’s the writer’s job to control those oral and visual hallucinations. So I’m always trying to make young writers think about what goes on when they’re sitting in a chair and reading fiction.
RUSSELL BANKS
Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
NIKKI GIOVANNI
Plagiarism can be easy, safe and rewarding if you follow one rule: Only plagiarize your own stuff. Not only is it not a criminal offense, it's extremely satisfying, since every writer believes deep in his heart that the finest words ever written, the only ones worth restating, are his own.
ALAN RICHMAN
In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE
Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one; it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.
HENRY MILLER
The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it—to remember, to keep in mind — as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain—to the end of the story—and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.
FRANK CONROY
I never found out the moon didn’t come up in the west until I was a writer and Herschel Brickell, the literary critic, told me after I misplaced it in a story. He said valuable words to me about my new profession: “Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky.”
EUDORA WELTY
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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