Stay Afraid

Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. Just do it and the confidence will follow.

CARRIE FISHER

Voice Emerges from an Informed Intelligence

My least favorite received idea about writing is that one must find one’s voice, as if it’s there inside you, fully formed and ready to turn on like a player piano. A voice is what emerges from an informed intelligence as it reaches toward accurate perception.

SARAH MANGUSO

Great Writers Make It Look Easy

A lot of younger writers tend to think it all boils down to genius. That, for the great writers, it’s all there—they just sit at the typewriter, or computer, and everything comes out. But the truth is that it never works that way. These young writers don’t know the enormous struggle that it happens to be. On the page, great writers make it look easy—but the ease is an illusion.

COLUM McCANN

Self-Doubt Can Be an Ally

Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

STEVEN PRESSFIELD

Writers Must Fortify Themselves with Pride and Egotism

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.

BRIAN ALDISS

It Is People's Secrets We Want to Know

God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people’s secrets we want to know -- it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.

AUGUST STRINDBERG

The Best Literature Is Always A Take

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.

JULIO CORTÁZAR

Art Pulls People Up Short

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

You Must Read Everything

You must read everything, and you must let it all the way into your life, all the way into the part of you that makes writing, and you must let every good thing in — none of this reading a few lines of so-and-so with the hope that you might write something that sounds like it.

SARAH MANGUSO

One Must Be Drenched in Words

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

HART CRANE