I fell in love—that is the only expression I can think of—at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.
DYLAN THOMAS
Writing a book, I quickly found out, was a crash course in anxiety. Years of being locked in a room with nothing but my thoughts, my future, my past in front of me. At the start of the dream, I hadn’t thought about the pain that would accompany it, only the excitement. Three months in, however, I was in the middle of the ocean, wailing and sputtering, drowning myself in fear. Never had I experienced such intense moments of frustration, pain, and anxiety over white space, blank pages, empty inboxes. I was crying in the shower, my right eye was twitching, and I’d picked up a new habit of chewing my hair. I can’t do it, I thought. There’s too much I don’t know, too much I can’t see.
LAUREN MARTIN
Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called “audacity,” which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
ANNE CARSON
The writer who survives by teaching writing may discover, however, that his teaching hurts his art. Dealing day in and day out with beginning writers, he finds himself forced continually to think in analytical fashion about problems he would normally solve in other ways. To make his student see clearly what is wrong in his or her fiction, the writer-teacher has no choice but to work in a fully conscious, intellectual way. Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronted by a problem in a novel he’s writing he does not consult his literary background. He feels his way to the solution.
JOHN GARDNER
Psychoanalysts in France, structuralists in the United States and France, conservative, liberal and left-wing thinkers in contemporary schools of linguistic philosophy agree about one thing: man became man not by the tool but by the Word. It is not walking upright and using a stick to dig for food or strike a blow that makes a human being, it is speech. And neither intelligent apes nor dolphins whispering marvels in the ocean share with us the ability to transform this direct communication into the written word, which sets up an endless chain of communication and commune between peoples and generations who will never meet.
NADINE GORDIMER
People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.
BILL BRYSON
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. What I’m looking for is a balance between a natural tone—intimate, conversational, as you say—and the maximum amount of tension, so that I can keep the reader engaged. Sentences need to have electrical current. There has to be both tautness and flexibility, speed and slowness, as in martial arts, which I have done a lot of. You have to simplify sentences as much as possible while making them take on more and more complex subject matter. I like what Hemingway says—Like everyone, I know some big words, but I try my damndest not to use them.
ANNE ENRIGHT
I can’t discard anything unless I finish it. So I have to finish the verses that I discard. So it takes a long time. I have to finish it to know whether it deserves to survive in the song. So in that sense, all the songs take a long time. And although the good lines come unbidden, they’re anticipated. And the anticipation involves a patient application to the enterprise.
LEONARD COHEN
Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.
MAYA ANGELOU
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN
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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