I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in...the edit.
WILL SELF
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that frustration is a part of the process. I’ve rarely written anything good that did not come out of moments of extreme frustration. It’s the frustration that propels you forward. If it doesn’t — if you back away from it — the work will be less than it could have been. When I teach writing, I find that students are relieved to hear this...that frustration is an indication of a literary problem to be solved, not a sign that they aren’t good enough writers.
DIANNE WARREN
The work of any great artist is directed at the heart, the spirit and the soul, not the brain. Critics feel with their brains, they probably fuck with their brains too. But the worst part is they fill their brainy shit into you and then we’re all made to feel we have to analyze literary works based on all this brainy shittage. No, if you feel Beckett, you see something else: that his writing evokes a sort of sacred chaos, a blissful holiday for the brain and a profoundly pleasurable call to the spirit.
AMITA MUKERJEE
The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.
JOY WILLIAMS
Life goes on, and for the sake of verisimilitude and realism, you cannot possibly give the impression of an ending: you must let something hang. A cheap interpretation of that would be to say that you must always leave a chance for a sequel. People die, love dies, but life does not die, and so long as people live, stories must have life at the end.
JOHN O’HARA
Writers who really understand myth don’t use it consciously. There are very few things that are truly mythical. There’s a lot of stuff that’s famous, but very few things that are the stuff of myth and legend.
JOHN MILIUS
Most humor depends on specificity. It’s funnier to say that a cheese steak tastes better when you’re leaning up against a Pontiac than when you are leaning up against a car.
CALVIN TRILLIN
Procrastination is available at your fingertips, the whole vast www world. Cat videos, vicious gossip about pop stars, survivalist blogs, right-wing paranoia, it’s all there. The Internet brought the barroom, the porn shop, the fleabag hotel lobby and the men’s locker room into every American home, and you can now hang out with ne’er-do-wells to your heart’s content without anybody knowing about it.
GARRISON KEILLOR
Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. I don't know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art's the same way.
JAMES LEE BURKE
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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