Our Power is Patience

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Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

KURT VONNEGUT

The Best Writing Advice

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The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from Dwight Macdonald: “Everything about the same subject in the same place.”

JAMES ATLAS

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is, “Knock ‘em dead with that lead sentence.”

WHITNEY BALLIETT

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was probably something Ted Solotaroff told me years ago when he was my editor. Going over a manuscript line by line again and again he kept reminding me, “Remember, this is your book, not my book. You’re the one who’s going to have to live with it the rest of your life. I might publish 30 or 40 books this year, you’re only going to publish one, and probably the only one you’re going to publish in two or three years.”

RUSSELL BANKS

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from William Zinsser: “Be grateful for every word you can cut.”

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

 

Best writing advice I’ve ever received: Sell everything three times.

MARGARET CARLSON

 

Best advice I ever got was from the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, who told me in Bucharest, before I emigrated: "Learn English. French is dead."

ANDREI CODRESCU

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received: “Don’t have children.” I gave it to myself.

RICHARD FORD

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: Don’t answer the phone.

PATSY GARLAN

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.

DAVID GUTERSON

 

The best writing advice I’ve ever heard: Don't write like you went to college.

ALICE KAHN


The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was, “Rewrite it!” A lot of editors said that. They were all right. Writing is really rewriting--making the story better, clearer, truer.

ROBERT LIPSYTE

 

Best advice on writing I’ve ever received: Finish.

PETER MAYLE

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: “Write with authority.

CYNTHIA OZICK

 

I think the best advice on writing I've received was from John Steinbeck, who suggested that one way to get around writer's block (which I was suffering hideously at the time) was to pretend to be writing to an aunt, or a girl friend. I did this, writing to an actress friend I knew, Jean Seberg. The editors of Harpers forgot to take off the salutation and that's how the article begins in the magazine: Dear Jean....

GEORGE PLIMPTON

 

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was given to me, like so much else, by Hubert Selby, Jr.: to learn and to know that writing is not an act of the self, except perhaps as exorcism; that, in writing what is worth being written, one serves, as vessel and voice, a power greater than vessel and voice.

NICK TOSCHES

 

Art is by Nature a Transgressive Act

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To write is to invade another's space, if only to memorialize it. To write is to invite angry censure from those who don't write, or who don't write in quite the way you do, for whom you may seem a threat. Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Plagiarism

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Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

VOLTAIRE

 

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism—of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

JOSEPH EPSTEIN

 

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

 

Plagiarism of style is the most nefarious of all forms of plagiarism and the shabbiest.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

 

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

WILLIAM BLAKE

 

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

HOWARD AIKEN

The Best Moments Involve a Loss of Control

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First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often—completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages—I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

DON DeLILLO