Chain That Muse to Your Desk

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Stories Aren't Just Entertainment

I will tell you something about stories. They aren't just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories.

LESLIE MARMON SILKO

Cross Your Fingers and Watch Your Back

I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Trust Your Own Judgment

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

DORIS LESSING

A Writer Is Not An Ideal Husband

I think a writer is not an ideal husband. . . . Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they’re living with, or they get irritable with the people that they’re living with when the people insist on being noticed.

ROY BLOUNT, JR.

Life Is Too Short for a Writer to Be Polite

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

JOHN UPDIKE

Writing Is Like Going On A Very Long Walk

When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe you up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it’s got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you’ve done all ties up. But it’s a very, very long, slow process.

ROALD DAHL

All the Great Story Lines Are Great Practical Jokes

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

KURT VONNEGUT

Nobody Knows Anything

Nobody sets out to fuck up your movie. It’s not like the director or the stars wake up in the morning and say, “Let’s screw up this scene. How can I really cause Bill Goldman pain?” It’s just that they’re terrified. I wrote a line once that caught on out there in Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” And they don’t. If we knew what we were doing, every movie would be wonderful. If actors knew what they were doing, every performance would be just swell. It’s a crapshoot. It just is. There’s no answer. I wish there were.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN

Writing Is A Way to Experience the Ecstatic

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

bell hooks