Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything.… It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.
ENID BAGNOLD
When novelists talk about what they’re working on, they rarely mention subject matter. Plot, theme, symbolism, character — those staples of English class — few of which have much to do with literature, don’t come up. Richard Ford has written thousands of passages about the New Jersey real estate agent Frank Bascombe, describing his marriage, his divorce, the death of his son, his health scares and his armchair philosophizing, but when I asked Ford what motivated him to write those books, he replied, “Oh, I just felt like I wanted to write something first-person, present tense.” He didn’t have to explain this to me. The right voice, once discovered, guides everything the writer does and supplies all necessary information and insight — often enough, things you didn’t think you knew.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Each work finds its own time. For many years I wrote at night. Then I became scared of writing at night, probably on account of the ghosts that you call to mind when you are writing, mostly when dealing with the subject of torture and other dark political issues. I’ve returned to the night shift just recently, and am rediscovering the pleasure of total silence. But I still enjoy jumping out of bed and onto the computer—from dream to word, with no time to repent.
LUISA VALENZUELA
I give it the first energy of the day. When I get up, I go to my office and start writing. I'm still in my pajamas. I haven't even brushed my teeth. I just go straight to it. I feel that there's a little package of creative energy that's somehow been nourished by sleep and I don't want to waste that. I'll work for an hour or two until I feel like I've got something going. Then I can get washed and dressed.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
GEORGE ORWELL
I detest my use of “Because” to open a sentence that is at a knight’s move to the previous one, where causation is not linear or, strictly speaking, “causation” at all, at all. I am tormented by my need for commas, writing, as I do, sentences that are endlessly qualified, internally undermined, self-contradictory; sentences that are put out of their misery by a fake full stop. Only to be taken up again in a new line. In fact most of my sentences are paragraphs that have been broken up in the interests of looking respectable. I wish I could stop this. I wish I could stop tripping the rhythm with short sharp sentences and with sentence fragments. I wish I could stop dancing and just go for a walk.
ANNE ENRIGHT
Many very talented writers are socially incompetent. And even if they are competent enough to deal with the regularity of the 9 to 6 job – or, as it’s now become worldwide, the 9 to 9 job – there’s another problem. The very process of drafting, revising, questioning everything that you’re presented with, which is what the literary writer does, means that when you step into a standard working environment, you recognize it as a ridiculous, arbitrary environment…. And you say to yourself, “I don’t want to do this, it’s ridiculous.” You reject it as being just a pawn in the system.
MOHSIN HAMID
I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
In Spanish as well as English you speak of a “loud color.” A “loud color” is a common phrase, but then the things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The difficulty is how to write with clarity that offers people access to any given moment while holding them in the complexity inherent in any subject. So there’s a lot of jostling and weighing one word over another, in terms of what I can get from that individual word. And that’s the world of the poem. Individual words have to do a lot of work.
CLAUDIA RANKINE
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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