Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.
There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.
Actors yearn for the perfect director, athletes for the perfect coach, priests for the perfect pope, presidents for the perfect historian. Writers hunger for the perfect reviewer. But this is an imperfect world.
To have written one good poem – good used seriously – is an unlikely and marvelous thing than only a couple hundred of writers of English, at the most, have done – it’s like sitting out in the yard in the evening and having a meteorite fall in one’s lap.
Best-Sellerism is the star system of the book world. A “best-seller” is a celebrity among books. It is known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down…If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him.
The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.
The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.
Gazing at the typewriter in moments of desperation, I console myself with three thoughts: alcohol at six, dinner at eight, and to be immortal you’ve got to be dead.
If you are getting the worst of it in an argument with a literary man, always attack his style. That’ll touch him if nothing else will.
There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I’m greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
We need not worry much about writers. Man will always find a means to gratify a passion. He will write, as he commits adultery, in spite of taxation.
I just sit at a typewriter and curse it a bit.
Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can’t they? Yet they can’t wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You get hurt, but you enjoy it.
I suggest that the only books that influenced us are those for which we are ready, and which gave gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is read.
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
The impulse to create beauty is rather rare in literary men…Far ahead of it comes the yearning to make money. And after the yearning to make money comes the yearning to make a noise.
Great writers leave us not just their work, but a way of looking at things.
I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.
Whatever their ultimate worth, each is part of a mosaic of our era.
Beginning is the hardest part. You roam the house, your rooms, the streets. You are jerked on the leash of your unease. Everything is calling to you – plants, children, animals, or worse, the need to make money; weed me, water me, feed me, pay me, clean me, tend me, buy me; while inside anxiety and tension curl like the edge of an oyster cooking.
To believe your thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.
Really, when I write a book I’m the only one I have to please. That’s the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay.
I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first time novelist who wasn’t awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn’t disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
My first novel was turned down by twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: “If she writes anything else, do let us know.” Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
I used to try to write better than certain dead writers of whose value I was certain. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
There’s nobody out there waiting for it, and nobody’s going to scold you if you don’t do it.
I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self pity, and both are bad for writers.
I’ve always had a feeling it’s dangerous to be friends with a writer…you can end up talking away your books.
You can never know enough about your characters.
Your agent is your lifeline, your reality check, and your best friend.
The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.
I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word mayonnaise.
They ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes, I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating and imaginary – it’s always imaginary – world in which I would like to live.
Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you’re going to say.
Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.
American writers never have a second act.
One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors.
When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.
I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.
A writer’s courage can easily fail him. I feel this daily.
It’s really scary just getting to the desk – we’re talking now five hours. My mouth gets dry, my heart beats fast. I react psychologically the way other people react when the plane loses an engine.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
I write a lot – ever day, seven days a week – and I throw a lot away. Sometimes I think I write to throw away; it’s a process of distillation.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
There is nothing so important as the book can be.
Writers who concentrate on pleasing all the time don’t have much ultimate impact. One of the functions of an author is to arouse.
The first advice I would give him would be to have him ask himself if he really wants to write, because it’s not all that fun.
I do not think that most writers write for money alone. Good ones write mainly to please themselves
It’s queer for a live human animal, endowed with intelligence, to spend waking hours of a very mortal life cooped up in a room, not talking to anybody, just scribbling words on a page.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
I’m basically a treacherous person with no sense of loyalty. I’d write openly about my sainted mother’s sex life for art.
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.
I know it’s finished when I can no longer stand working on it.
Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
It is a psychological trait in human nature that interest is established in the persons whom the play writing introduces at the beginning of his play so firmly that if the interest is then switched off to other persons who enter upon the scene later, a sense of disappointment ensues.
It is more difficult to get a qualified literary agent than it is to get a publishing contract.
The novelist is, above all, the historian of conscience.
It’s important that a novel be approached with some urgency. Spend too long on it, or have great gaps between writing sessions, and the unity of the work tends to be lost.
Books are…funny little portable pieces of thought.
I divide all readers into classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
I do think that the quality which makes a man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and is masochistic. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.
Being a writer in the South has its special miseries, which include isolation, madness, tics, amnesia, alcoholism, lust and loss of ordinary powers of speech. One may go for days without saying a word.
I get very tired of reading about writers. I don’t even understand why people want to read novels about them. There’s apparently some glamour, but I’ll be damned if I can see it. I would much rather try to understand the lives of people who don’t write letters to the New York Review of Books.
If my doctor told me I only had six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Until the manuscript is delivered, power is shared. When the manuscript enters the publishing process, power shifts to the publisher. It is the publisher who decides how the book is presented to the public.
Most editors generally can’t recognize bad writing when they read it. Nor do they try very hard to learn to recognize it.
A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
Those big-shot writers…could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.
I’ve never signed a contract, so never have a deadline. A deadline’s an unnerving thing. I just finish a book, and if the publisher doesn’t like it that’s his privilege. There’ve been many, many rejections. If you want to write it your won way, that’s the chance you take.
There are some books of which scores of copies are bought for one which is read, and others which have dozens of readers for every copy sold.
Let it be kept until the ninth year, the manuscript put away at home: you may destroy whatever you haven’t published; once out, what you’ve said can’t be stopped.
It circulated for five years, through the halls of fifteen publishers, and finally ended up with Vanguard Press, which, as you can see, is rather deep into the alphabet. [Auntie Mame]
If you have to pick it after the book is done, it’s like trying to buy the right wedding ring.
I went for years not finishing anything. Because of course, when you finish something you can be judged…I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
One of the reasons why many writers turn into alcoholics is that early in their lives they find that getting drunk is part of the creative process, that it opens up visions. It’s a terrible sort of creative device, because three out of four who involve themselves in it become alcoholics. But it does open doors in the beginning.
Style and structure are the essence of a good book; great ideas are hogwash.
I hate to write; I like to revise. And the amount of revision I do is terrific. I like to get the first draft out of my system. That’s the hardest thing for me.
Poets are born, not paid.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
I wrote the scenes…by using the same apprehensive imagination that occurs in the morning before an afternoon’s appointment with my dentist.
You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don’t know what’s going to happen to you between getting on the boat and getting off.
All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.
Writing a story or a novel is like finding your way around a strange room in the dark. When you get through the first draft you think the light will go one. But it often doesn’t.
I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking dictation, I stop.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
I think writing does come out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some kind of gap. No one in his right mind would sit down to write a book if he were a well-adjusted happy man.
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
And ordinary man can…surround himself with two thousand books…and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
There is no formula which may be depended upon to produce a bestseller. There are too many impalpable considerations, too many chances and accidents, too complex a combination of conditions affecting the writing, publication, and selling of a book that make the attainment of the top rank by even the most promising candidate a certainty.
If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.
The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
I write to find out.
An author is always unconsciously fighting for an image and, when he gets one, consciously fighting against it.
Writing, like making love, is more fun when you know what you’re doing.
I’m a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have lousy taste.
The wastepaper basket is still the writer’s best friend.
If you are getting the worst of it in an argument with a literary man, always attack his style. That’ll touch him if nothing else will.
From 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 pm. I can write as though in a trance. Trying to produce anything in the afternoon makes me feel like an ox pulling a loaded cart with sticky wheels. At night I might as well be writing in Swahili.
If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining a book is not writing. Researching is not writing. Talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
Writing is communication, not self-expression; nobody in this world want to read your diary, except your mother.
At the end of every book, I feel like killing myself. You think you’ll never write one again – until you use up the advance.
The beginner who submits a detective novel longer than 80,000 words is courting rejection.
If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.
If we should ever inaugurate a hall of fame, it would be reserved exclusively and hopefully for authors who, having written four bestsellers, still refrained from starting out on a lecture tour.
I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.
Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event, is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism does he write “I had a fun time”? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don’t know that you will prove anything this way, but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing.
The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read.
And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, ‘Without me the literary industry would not exis: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages – all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.’
When I am dead. I hope it is said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and…no other task is of any consequence.
No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers and poets in contempt. They do it because they get no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question.
There are other writers who would persuade you not to go on, that everything is nonsense, that you should kill yourself. They, of course, go on to write another book while you have killed yourself.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Screenwriters are like little gypsies swimming in an aquarium filled with sharks, killer whales, squid octopuses and other creatures of the deep. And plenty of squid shit.
Most writers…are awful sticks to talk with.
All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation – it is the self escaping into the open. No writer long remains incognito.
I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don’t walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.
Easy reading is damned hard writing.
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.
Books, nowadays, are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, and even written by people who do not understand them.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
One is improvising when one writes, and you can pick up in the same way a musician starts to improvise and detect the inner structure of what he’s playing – that’s the way I think it works in the writing of a novel. You pick up the beat.
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
The computer I write on is never connected to a phone line or other Internet portal. I use a desktop and a lap top for travel. I still write longhand occasionally and edit with a BIG red pen so I can see the blood on the page.
Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
The legend that characters run away from their authors – taking up drugs, having sex operations, and becoming president – implies that the writer is a fool with no knowledge or mastery of his craft. The idea of authors running around helplessly behind their cretinous inventions is contemptible.
To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer’s love for another writer is never quite free of malice.
Responding to criticism is a foolish thing for a writer to do, and an unpleasant one. It is much better to read only the advertisements of your work and note, briefly, your royalty reports. These will tell you how popular you are. How good you are, or are not, is a thing you should know only too well yourself.
The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and, if they publish it, maybe no one will read it.
Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
I really don’t want to encourage younger writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. Do they talk about encouraging younger actresses? No. You don’t want any younger actress to come along and outshine you.
Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do…is to write as little as possible.
There are yards of writers under the age of thirty, but not many who stay the course. The ones who do aren’t necessarily the most gifted but those who can focus well, discipline themselves, persevere through hard times, and spring back after rejections that would cripple others.
Writers who use alcohol to shut themselves down at the end of the day risk hangover or worse; heavy drinking damages short-term memory – exactly the kind of memory you need to juggle words and sentences and evoke associations as you write.
I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book—sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.
The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book.
That’s why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.
Write every day; never give up; it’s supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can’t look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.
‘A Fair Maiden’ existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes – ‘ideas for stories.’ Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly – in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.
Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.
The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it’s icy, and I’m in bare feet.
It must be five times as hard to become a proficient writer as to become a proficient doctor, mainly because there is no true and tried education process for a writer, so every fellow who wants to write for profit, including my daughter Nora, must be prepared for a long, slow, and often very discouraging preparation. But if he’s got it in him to be a writer, this won’t stop him. If he stops, it’s a fair sign that he was never intended to be a writer in the first place.
Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts on himself.
The actual process of writing…demands complete, noiseless privacy, without even music; a baby howling two blocks away will drive me nuts.
Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pear sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
In order to be a good writer, you’ve got to be a bad boss. Self-discipline and stamina are the two major arms in a writer’s arsenal.
Writing is like making love. You have to practice to be good at it.
Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent.
If I go into Universal and even mention the word art, security forces will come and take me away.
If it doesn’t work, begin something else.
In no other vehicle is contemporary life so adequately expressed.
Writing is the loneliest job in the world.
Authorship is a fantasy, a dream of most aspirants. It’s a glittering notion, a mirage with their name on the title page.
It is my belief that talent is plentiful, and that what is lacking is staying power.
You have to have a name today to get a script read. The story doesn’t count for anything anymore. It’s all money, money, money.
There are passages in every novel whose first writing is pretty much the last. But it’s the joint and cement, between those spontaneous passages, that takes a great deal of rewriting.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark places where it leads.
I once visited a successful Hollywood producer, and he gave me a list of what the American people don’t like. They’ve done market research, and they know…The only movie one is allowed to write is a cheap imitation of last year’s blockbuster.
Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
Unless you are a Dickens, you either write literature or you write what sells.
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
In writing a novel, there is in the beginning what I would call a theme. It’s not an idea but a feeling. Then this feeling goes on developing and unraveling itself, like a rope. This is why I say a novel writes itself.
Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.
If an artist does not spring to his work as a soldier to the breach, if once within the crater he does not labor as a miner buried in the earth, if he contemplates his difficulties instead of conquering them one by one, the work remains unachieved, production becomes impossible, and the artist assists the suicide of his own talent…The solution of the problem can be found only through incessant and sustained work…True artists, true poets, generate and give birth today, tomorrow, ever. From this habit of labor results a ceaseless comprehension of difficulties which keep them in communion with the muse and her creative forces.
I never had much patience with women who said, “Well, I can’t work this week or next week or the week after, but maybe I’ll work in six month’s time or maybe in a year’s time.” I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you’re a professional or not.
Of the legion of women who toy with arts and letters, very few persevere; and even those who pass this first obstacle will very often continue to be torn between their narcissism and an inferiority complex. In ability to forget themselves is a defect that will weight more heavily upon them than upon women in any other career; if their essential aim is the formal satisfaction of success, they will not give themselves over to the contemplation of the world; they will be incapable of re-creating in it art.
If a story is in you, it has got to come out.
Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.
Wasting time. The old cry – the first and last cry – why do ye tarry? Ah, why indeed? My deepest desire is to be a writer, to have “a body of work” done And there the work is, there the stories wait for me, grow tired, wilt, fade because I will not come. And I hear and acknowledge them, and still I go on sitting at the window, playing with a ball of wool.
Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice: once in reality and once in the mirror which waits always before and behind him.
You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting on your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
I think, to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
You must for once and all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.
One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.
The best part about writing is stopping.
Writing doesn’t require drive. It’s like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
A nice peaceful place with some good light.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
Pity the poor – or even the rich – Hollywood screenwriter. Unlike his compatriot novelists, playwrights, journalists or even poets, nobody knows his name. Or cares.
I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
All the media are often guilty of producing outrageous trash and pretentious nonsense. But all of them have greatly enriched us as well on innumerable occasions. In particular, the book publishing industry, with all its faults, still constitutes a major civilizing force because books continue to respond to basic human needs and aspirations.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Don’t forget both you and the editor are putting on an unceasing act for the public, and between you there should be the same relation that exists between the magician and his assistant, offstage.
There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important to all to reach the heart of the reader.
Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics; they desire our blood, not our pain.
When power leads man to arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’ s concern, poetry reminds him of richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.
Failure is very difficult for a writer to bear, but very few can manage the shock of early success.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
I finished my first book seventy six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later, publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
Publication is the auction of the Mind of Man.
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
Sometimes people give titles to me, and sometimes I see them on a billboard.
About a year ago in April I hit a wall. The way I felt reminded me of my favorite quote from Norman Mailer in ‘Cannibals and Christians’ when he says ‘the terrible thing is you wake up 150 pages later and realize you’ve made a terrible mistake.’
Sneaking up on it sometimes helps: I’ve found that I can be very productive for an hour before dinner, because there obviously isn’t enough time to really do anything, so I kid myself I’m just screwing around.
I never could understand how two men can write a book together; to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.
You can always write something. You write limericks. You write a love letter. You do something to get you in the habit of writing again, to bring back the desire.
Isn’t disloyalty as much the writer’s virtue as loyalty is the soldiers?
I’m not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting whose seven hours if he’s not in the mood and doesn’t feel the juice. I don’t think discipline equals creativity.
This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades. They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
Once writers commit words to paper, they’re no longer sole proprietors of their own business. They’ve taken the page on as a partner. This partner can be as surly, insolent, and pigheaded as a fourteen-year-old who’s been told to clean his room.
I write on napkins. One time, this seventeen-year-old waitress says to me, “Do you write on napkins because it doesn’t count?” And bingo. That’s exactly why I do it! When you’re jotting on a napkin, you’re not committing yourself. It’s only a napkin, right? You can throw it away. You’d be surprised. It loosens you up. Some of the best stuff I’ve written has been done on napkins.
I am convinced that all writers are optimists whether they concede the point or not…How otherwise could any human being sit down to a pile of blank sheets and decide to write, say two hundred thousand words on a give theme?
Convince yourself that you are working in clay not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: let the first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. No one will rush out and print it as it stands. Just put it down; then another.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprises for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say.
Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of the day makes that day happier.
The desire for the greatest possible number of readers is to me not only justifiable, but a proper ambition for every writer to entertain.
The chief reason that so many of the great classics seem to speak so directly to us is that the authors were consciously trying to reach us, or at least people with an astonishing resemblance to us.
If they’re meant to be writers, they will write. There’s nothing that can stop them.
There is probably no other trade in which there is so little relationship between profits and actual value, or into which sheer chance so largely enters.
I write because I like to write.
The most glamorous, brilliant, prestigious authors still sit by themselves with their tortured psyches and numbed fingers.
I believe the saddest news one has to give any young writer just setting out is that very few good writers are able to support themselves by writing.
There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Screenwriting is the toughest craft, and when you write well, when you create a good story, people with characters that truly relate to each other, that evoke tears or laughter…then you can write your own ticket.
I rewrite everything, almost idiotically. I rewrite and work and work, and rewrite and rewrite some more.
We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
The only test of a work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
My characters are quite as real to me as so-called people; which is one reason why I’m not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.
Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude – and now and then a piece of red meat.
Critics can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
In order to write at a high level of competence you need a comprehensive vocabulary; a keen sense of overall structure, and an inner beat or cadence. Your senses must be razor-sharp. Alcohol blunts those sense even as it releases self-restraint. Therefore many writers feel they are getting down to the real story after a belt or two, little realizing they are damaging their ability to tell the real story.
I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.
The only way to learn is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviewers, the stacks in Brentanos, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.
I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend – to make flights, carry others along if he could manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.
I’m only really alive when I’m writing.
It’s as lonesome at the end or on the mountaintops as it is at the beginning or in the valleys.
The life of a writer is usually one of permanent insecurity.
I never write – indeed, am physically incapable of writing – anything I don’t think will be paid for.
A really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn’t advance the story.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitutions in the soul.
Successful men and women…don’t consider the odds. They just sneak up at night and cut their own holes in the fence.
Finish a book and there is a sense of accomplishment; finish a script and the shit starts.
To rewrite ten times is not unusual.
The innocent writer can be eaten alive by a publisher’s contract. It’s common for publishers to try and take a share of movie rights, foreign rights, anything they can grab. Only an experienced agent knows when to make a cancelling sweep of the pen.
The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
Literature is, perhaps, the most powerful of the arts.
I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has to get down to work.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed.
You must write, not just think you’re going to…And you must widen your vocabulary, enjoy words. You must read widely, not in order to copy, but to find your own voice. It’s a matter of going through life with all one’s senses alive, to be responsive to experience, to other people.
I would get up every morning, go to my office and write without qualms until I felt it was time go go home. As I neared the end I was too frightened that I might lose the conclusion – which I did not know yet – and so I merely sat in the garden and wrote in a notebook. I suddenly felt an enormous tension; but my ending, when it came, surprised me into laughter. I felt like a spectator at my own game.
Life without work – I would commit suicide. Therefore work is more important than life.
A small press is an attitude, a kind of anti-commerciality. The dollars come second, the talent and the quality of the writing come first. If the presses wanted to make money, they’d be out there selling cookbooks.
The job of editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world.
Some reviews give pain. That is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.
Not gods, not men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets being second-rate.
Some writers thrive with the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one’s virginity it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proofsheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just gotten his first dose of the pox.
Publishers will tell you, with their tongue in their cheek, that every manuscript which reaches their office is faithfully read, but they are not to be believed. At least fifteen out of twenty manuscripts can be summarily rejected, usually with safety. There may be a masterpiece among them, but it is a thousand to one against.
Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty…like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
There comes a moment in the day, when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes the hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.
I keep telling young writers I meet that if they want the sure road to success, for heaven’s sake, write something that will make people laugh.
You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze the unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
I feel like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.
In general, computers give writing an elastic quality, which authors like myself find reassuring. My own worst writing fears have to do with indelibility. As long as I feel that mistakes can be corrected, improvements made, material added, such fears are tempered.
What is a writer but a schmuck with an Underwood?
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
The great struggle of a writer is to learn to write as he would talk.
I have never been good at revising. I always thought I made things worse by recasting and retouching. I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.
Poet: lofty synonym for “blockhead.”
I’m a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I’m a pawnbroker of myth.
Impoverished writers remind me of Somerset Maugham’s remark about multilingual people. He admired them, he said, but did not find that their condition made them necessarily wise.
I don’t enjoy writing, and I certainly would not do it for a living. Some people do, but some people enjoy flagellation.
Gazing at the typewriter in moments of desperation, I console myself with three thoughts: alcohol at six, dinner at eight, and to be immortal you’ve got to be dead.
Writing’s not terrible, it’s wonderful. I keep my own hours, do what I please. When I want to travel, I can. I’m doing what I most wanted to do all my life. I’m not into the agonies of creation.
People who read me seem to be divide into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty five percent hate me for the right reasons. It’s that last twenty-five percent that worries me.
You write for children the same way you write for grownups, only better.
All writers are a little crazy but if they are any good they have a kind of terrible honesty.
People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy – and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
Only a small minority of authors over-write themselves. Most of the good and the tolerable ones do not write enough.
Any man with a moderate income can afford to buy more books than he can read in a lifetime.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a doze other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over a ball.
I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person, and write to that one.
No one can really tell a beginning writer whether or not he has what it takes…The young writer must decide for himself, on the available evidence.
The money I got for my first novel came to around $2.50 an hour. I worked on a movie once where the producers wanted the screenplay so fast and so desperately that I made about $500 an hour. It wasn’t any better than things I’ve never been able to sell. Getting paid for writing is a bad joke that has nothing to do with the value of what you’ve written.
What motivates a writer to produce a particular work is really nobody’s business. Some pretty fair poems have been written because the poet wanted to make time with a young woman, and Balzac did most of his writing because he had no alternative; the creditors were beating on the door, waiting to be finished so they could get paid.
I haven’t met many writers who feel comfortable with writing.
There exists a stupid literary tradition…that a hungry writer is the best writer – an empty stomach and slum dwelling being considered most conducive to good books, honest books, uncorrupted books. Revolting nonsense, I say…The really hungry writer, I truly believe, is the one most susceptible to corruption and dishonesty, for he has a problem that must intrude on his creativity. The problem is: he must eat. And to eat, he must often put aside writing as he pleases, to write potboilers for the marketplace, to write what he is told to write. The writer who has money, enough or not, has to compromise with no one, do nothing he does not want to do. He can afford to write as he pleases.
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
For a great many people the activity of becoming successful is more rewarding than the success itself. It’s certainly true of the novelists I know.
I never wrote anything that was published until I was forty.
It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.
Writers are the perennial bottom dogs of Hollywood, their work bent, folded, spindled and mutilated at the whims of agents, actors, directors, producers, studio executives and anyone else with a mind to interfere.
There are very few pages in Ragtime that I didn’t write a half-dozen times or more.
A poet can survive anything but a misprint.
A great book is often ahead of its time, and the trick is how to keep it afloat until the times catch up with it.
Never pursue literature as a trade.
It is harder for a new writer to get an agent than a publisher.
There is no genius without a mixture of madness.
To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanence of what he has written; he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
The problem is when you’re not writing you don’t know if you’re lying fallow or if you’ll never write again.
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
I don’t begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don’t mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It’s astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might has well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.
I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of – or I did have – drawers full of rejection slips.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
We like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
I have often thought that this might be my last book. I don’t really mean that because I wll be writing books until I die. But I want to write this one as though it were my last book. Maybe I believe that every book should be written that way.
My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
Nine out of ten writers, I am sure, could write more. I think they should and, if they did, they would find their work improving even beyond thie own, their agent’s and their editors highest hopes.
You cannot be both a good socializer and a good writer. You have to choose.
Writers seldom wish other writers well.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
You cannot tell a man by the lobster he eats, but you can tell something about him by the literature he reads.
If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers.
Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Success may come at any stage of a novelist’s life.
If a writer’s ego ever wilts, he is ruined. It is the only thing that can sustain him through those lonely months while he is trying to piece together a book out of one recalcitrant word after another. Every morning he has to persuade himself, all over again, that putting words on paper is the most important thing in the world…that he has something to say which thousands of people not only will listen to, but pay for…Only an egomaniac can believe these things, for they defy all the evidence.
Tis a vanity common to all writers, to overvalue their own production.
It’s a bastard art…in that no one reads what you write, except people who are going to destroy it.
I retype everything four, five, six times – critical passages more – and everything, say, three times. It takes me that long.
If every agent in the ends turns you down, you will know you’re either not good enough or too good. If you’re too good, keep writing, and keep your contacts with the writing community available to you, and eventually your day will come.
Publishers are not necessarily either philanthropists or rogues…As a working hypothesis, regard them as ordinary human beings trying to earn their living at an unusually difficult occupation.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Every compulsion is put on writers to become safe, polite, obedient and sterile.
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
Genius, in fact, may be defined as the ability to control luck.
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
My first novel was turned down by twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: “If she writes anything else, do let us know.” Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles, and what we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.
A novelist’s character must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dream. He must learn to hatae them and to love them.
The novelist is dead in the man who has become aware of the triviality of human affairs.
Keep chasing the written word and the next story. Don’t let bad rejection discourage you. And don’t expect to be an overnight success in less than 6000 nights. You’ll know what you’re doing and have a much longer career.
The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities something like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychiatrist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord’s prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.
No furniture is so charming as books.
I don’t have a sense of a so-called reader and certainly not of a readership, that terrific entity. I write for the page.
Writing a book is such a complicated, long-term, difficult process that all of the possible motive that you can funnel in will, and a great many of those motives will be base. If you can transform your particular baseness into something beautiful, that’s about the best you can make of your own obnoxious nature.
The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.
The truth is that editing lines is not necessarily the same as editing a book. A book is a much more complicated entity and totality than the sum of its lines alone. Its structural integrity, the relation and proportion of its parts, and its total impact could escape even a conscientious editor exclusively intent on vetting the book line by line.
The only reason I didn’t kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn’t decide which one to jump into.
Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
I don’t keep any copy of my books around…They would embarrass me. When I finish writing my books, I kick them in the belly, and have done with them.
I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, “To hell with you.”
Everyone needs an editor.
A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
In my opinion the readers of novels are far more intelligent than unsuccessful writers will believe. They are expert in detecting and merciless to the conceited author, and the insincere author, and the author with all the tools of literature at his command who has nothing to say worth reading.
Reading about imaginary characters and their adventures is the greatest pleasure in the world. Or the second greatest.
The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talk about her own children.
Writer’s block is a misnomer. What’s called writer’s block is almost always fear.
I don’t see how you can write honestly without interfering with serious relationships.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can mange to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Books, if you don’t put them first, tend to sulk. They retreat into a corner, and refuse to work.
I like the tactile part of it, I like rolling the paper and pushing the lever at the end of the line. I like the bell that rings like an old train. It’s a great piece of machinery. I even like crumpling up pages that don’t work. I don’t like the idea that technology might fail me. I don’t like the idea that the words aren’t really on something.
If the first novel is successful, the writer buys a serious, writerly object that bespeaks investment and confidence – a word processor, a new bookshelf, reams of white paper…In any case, a new and bigger wastebasket.
I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. I wish I could break the habit but I can’t. The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best advantage, with a hangover.
The boldest writers of all are those who leave no doubt in the reader’s mind about what they’re getting at. These writers have no wiggle room: no path to escape, to reinterpret, or to claim their ideas were to complex for simple minds.
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God dammit, I split it so it will stay split.
By reading what he has last written, just before he recommences his task, the writer will catch the tone and spirit of what he is then saying, and will avoid the fault of seeming to be unlike himself.
Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that the critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
Writers, if they are worthy of that jealous designation, do not write for other writers. They write to give reality to experience.
I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
The writing table is perfect. I have never been so content with anything. And the blue wing-back chair is wonderfully comfortable. I think that if I can be relaxed, the book has a chance of being relaxed, and I have a very strong feeling about this book being completely at ease and comfortable.
I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.
Most writers, you know, are awful sticks to talk with.
I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs at Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “Wolf! Wolf!” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying, “Wolf! Wolf!” and there was no wolf behind him.
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
Learn to trust your own judgement, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort good from bad – including your own bad. Do not pay attention to current literary modes, for they can be observed changing, sometimes overnight.
A lot of money means a lot of time to write, a real luxury. Time to write is so important that I’m distressed to hear how many people in the literary community seem to frown on commercial success. Of course, the people who frown on it the most actively are those of us who no longer need it; there’s at least a little hypocrisy in this.
Of the many people who contribute to the making of a book, from the sweeper at the printing plant, to the publisher in a paneled office, the worst paid, on any basis you care to name is the writer.
Dismissing Dr. Johnson’s assertion that, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote for money,” it is safe to say that most writers aren’t in it for the wages, fringe benefits, or short hours. There are much easier ways to make a buck and few better ways to stay poor. No. Lurking in the shadows behind every writer is the relentless spirit of the zealot. The act of writing is an act of faith; someone will be read and perhaps be changed.
It’s a crazy business, anyway, locking yourself in a room and inventing conversations, no way for a grownup to behave.
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius, which is apt to be perturbable and wear itself out before fruition.
Write without pay until somebody offers you pay. If nobody offers within three years the candidate may look upon the circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Most people who earn their livings as writers are a little nuts – perhaps not certifiable – but certainly not exactly your average American.
I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.
Screenplay writing is at best a compromise. You have to satisfy so many people while you’re writing, while you’re shooting, and after you’ve shot. You find that these people don’t necessarily have the courage of your conviction. Which is why so few original screenplays are written.
I work over my manuscript many times until I feel there is nothing more that I can change to improve it.
I’ve always had complete confidence in myself. When I was nothing, I had complete confidence. There was ten guys in my writing class at Williams College who could write better than I. They didn’t have what I have, which is guts. I was dedicated to writing and nothing could stop me.
I think the percentage of very good books – the really notable books – that are declined is higher than the percentage of the highly competent mediocrities. The reason is that the books of the greatest talent are almost always full of trouble, and difficult, and do not conform to the usual standards.
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
If you can’t describe a book in one or two pithy sentences that would make you or my mother want to read it, then of course you can’t sell it.
Until you have canvassed at least 25-30 publishers you haven’t given your book the chance it has to get published.
The odds against an unknown writer getting a manuscript published by simply sending it directly to a publishing house are astronomical.
In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
Every editorial guideline exists to be broken.
There is nothing like a good negative review to sell a book.
I don’t generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what’s going to happen.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
I am not interested in fiction. I want faithfulness.
The value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces the qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our failures and limitations.
My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.
A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.
My first novel – the novel I wrote before ‘Midnight’s Children’ – feels, to me, now, very – I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I’m, you know, I’m happy for.
Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don’t they will feel betrayed.
It is true that writers are pillagers of privacy? Yes. And it is also true that others get hurt along the way. But what are a few hurt feelings along the fiction rail.
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.
In the arts, there are no A’s rewarded for effort.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
To me, a real “failure” is to write a bad book. A public failure is to have a book that is not a success – that’s not the same thing.
My reputation grows with every failure.
Many books fail which would have succeeded two or three years earlier, or two or three years later, because the mood of the public – the directions in which the winds of interest blow – change so rapidly.
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
The worst that can happen to the writer who tries and fails – unless he has inflated or mystical notion of what it is to be a novelist – is that he will discover, for him, writing is not the best place to seek joy and satisfaction. More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.
Writing is essentially a private toil. You have very few things to work with – the gifts you were born with, which nobody can change, and some ability to educate yourself in a literary way, which you must do on your own. There’s only one thing that can be given externally, and that is the inspiration of praise.
Most writers are in a state of gloom a good deal of the time; they need perpetual reassurance.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
When I was a ten-year-old book worm and used to kiss the dustjacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You’re sort of a predator, an invader of people.
Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book—sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.
I’m terrible about titles; I don’t know how to come up with them. They’re the one thing in the story I’m really uncertain about.
Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness – when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much bigger it out to be.
That’s the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It’s just the same enemy – blank paper.
The awful thing about the first sentence of any book is that as soon as you’ve written it you realize this piece of work is not going to be the great thing that you envision. It can’t be.
A hack is on the constant hunt for “ideas” for his plots or “new angles.” The real writer is haunted by a plot which he must write out of inner necessity. His is impervious to suggestions.
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out that one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style
And it is interesting to think what paper and pencil and the wriggling words are. They are nothing but the trigger into joy – the shout of beauty – the carcajada of the pure bliss of creation. And often the words do not even parallel the feeling except sometimes in intensity. Thus a man full of a bursting joy may write with force and vehemence of some sad picture – o the death of beauty or the destruction of a lovely town – and there is only the effectiveness to prove how great and beautiful was his feeling.
Don’t let pretentious literary talk fool you into believing that writers just write for themselves. Writing for yourself aloen is creative masturbation. We do write to please ourselves, but basically we write to be read. Writing is not only a means of self-expression and catharsis, it is also a compulsive form of egotistical and infantile exhibitionism.
The only sound advice I can give to the young writer is to tell him to have faith in himself. Whether he is talented or not, he must have enough faith in himself to disregard all advice and all criticism.
It’s my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say “Good job.”
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation for the editor.
Of course no writers ever forget their first acceptance…One fine day when I was seventeen I had my first, second and third, all in the same morning’s mail. Oh, I’m here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase!
What release to write so that no one forgets oneself, forgets one’s companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next, to be drenched in sleep or in the sea. Pencils and pads and curling blue sheets alive with letters heap up on the desk.
I see my role as helping the writer to realize his or her intention.
The writer must cultivate his arrogance and have no regard for these parasites.
Everybody can write; writers can’t do anything else.
You write a hit the same way you write a flop.
Oh! It’s a real horse’s ass business.
I think the writer in America doesn’t enjoy a very exalted position; he is really a third-rate citizen.
When writers are out in public the laughter level is high, and they’re very buoyant – even without alcohol – because they’re not at home feeling like they’re taking a test.
The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the whole transaction. There is probably no other trade in which there is so little relationship between profits and actual value, or into which sheer chance so largely enters.
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of his healthy process of change and growth.
Never make excuses, never let them see you bleed, and never get separated from your baggage.
In conversation you can use timing, a look, inflection, pauses. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.
For me, the criterion for a really fine novel is the author has created a total world in which his people move credibly. The books that do that, I prize very much.
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
I don’t want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford.
The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
A writer’s intention hasn’t anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn’t matter in the end. Just what comes out.
I think the writer is on track when the door of his native and deeper intuitions is open. You write a sentence that doesn’t come from that source and you can’t build around it – it makes the page seem somehow false.
I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must somehow be poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice – they all make fine fuel.
Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person. The novelist, afraid his ideas might be foolish, slyly puts them into the mouth of some other fool, and reserves the right to discover them.
People need books with an epic background. They are bored with books that tell only one story on one level. They need something fantastic, something that gives them a sense of living in history. As it is , most novels aren’t giving readers a chance to use their sense of history.
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.
A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what ist true, to protect it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.
The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always pays to an audience of one.
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
Novels are wild cards. No one knows what makes a novel sell.
The trouble with contemporary novels is that they are full of people not worth knowing. The characters slide in and out of the mind with hardly a ripple.
In literary criticism there are no criteria, no accepted standards of excellence by which to test the work.
For me it is torture when I finish a novel. The good time is when I’m writing When I am finished it’s no more fun.
An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books – I don’t care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi, and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.
It is part of prudence to thank an author for his book before reading it, so as to avoid the necessity of lying about it afterwards.
For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written…She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown-up. While they were growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her and probably she is involved in another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.
Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has claimed.
What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading a book which everyone else is reading.
All literature, all art, best seller or worst, must be sincere, if it is to be successful…Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers; and only someone with a mind like Shelley’s can write Prometheus Unbound. The deliberate forger has little chance with his contemporaries and none at all with posterity.
One thing I learned about my first novel was what all the reviewers thought of it, from Little Rock to Broken Hill, for I subscribed to a press-cutting agency, a thing I have not done since. I learned thus, what I have had no occasion to unlearn, that reviewers do not read books with much care, and that their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
Editors are no longer father-confessors. Most of them are acquisition editors who are more concerned with bringing home the bacon than in trying to rewrite the bacon.
I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature. All that is necessary in the production of a book is an author and a bookseller, without the intermediate parasite.
I am trying – in a good cause – to crowd people out of their own minds and occupy their space. I want them to stop being themselves for the moment, I want them to stop thinking, and I want to occupy their heads. I want to use language and I want the language to reverberate and I want to use the white spaces between the lines.
He is so stupid you can’t trust him with an idea. He is so clever he will catch you in the least error. He will not buy short books. He will not buy long books. He is part moron, part genius and part ogre. There is some doubt as to whether he can read.
I don’t think the author should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror ever morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.
The important thing is that you make sure that neither the favorable nor the unfavorable critics move into your head and take part in the composition of your next work.
What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion makes the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who’d rather write a good story.
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone, uninterruped, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Everything goes by the board: humor, pride, decency…to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
I have written – often several times – every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures.
I feel that sometimes when I am writing I am very near to a kind of unconsciousness. Then time does change its manner and minutes disappear into the cloud of time which is one thing, having only one duration.
A strange and mystic business, writing. Almost no progress has taken place since it was invented. The Book of the Dead is as good and as highly developed as anything in the 20th century and much better than most. And yet in spite of this lack of a continuing excellence, hundreds of thousands of people are in my shoes – praying feverishly for relief from their word pangs.
In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious abuot what will happen to the hero.
When I’m writing I’m always aware than this friend is going to like this, or that another friend is going to like that paragraph or chapter, always thinking of specific people. In the end all books are written for your friends.
A novel can educate to some extent. But first, a novel has to entertain – that’s the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I’ll give you a reason to turn every page.
I never work out a plot – I always say that plots belong in cemeteries.
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course, if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, his is content.
It seems to be as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one’s reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one’s travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption.
If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them, peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they ar. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.
Lee Pennington has been published in more than 300 magazines – and rejected so many times that in one six-month period he papered all four wall of a room with rejection slips.
I think to a certain extent that a lot of the more adventurous writers – the good poets, writers of experimental fiction, and people with a lot of interesting, upbeat ideas – are giving up on mainstream publishers. They are signing on with the small houses because they think they will get a more sympathetic ear (1982).
Immortality depends on promotion, not on literary genius.
Books are a form of immortality. The words of men whose bodies are dust still live in their books…All the great lives that have lived have been told about in books.
Since you usually can expect no earthly reward – money, fame, the things other artists get – if you write poetry, you have to do it for love.
Remember that the reviewer who dismissed you with a sneer will, if the book is a success, greet you five years later with, “How much did I enjoy that book!”
I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.
Authors are like beds; even the most artistic requires to be made.
There is only one thing worse than a bad review, being ignored altogether.
After something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore.
Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the authors’ soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet. Psychology and X-rays bring up some portentous shadows, but for the full parfum and effluvia of being human, for feathery ambiguity and rank facticity, for the air and iron, fire and spit of our daily mortal adventure there is nothing like fiction: it makes sociology look priggish, history problematical, the film media two-dimensional, and the National Enquirer as silly as last week’s cereal box.
When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears – I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer’s block.
I believe what makes book sell, more than anything else, is word of mouth.
Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.
Let me tell you about writing for films. You finish your book. Now, you know where the California state line is? Well, drive to it, take your manuscript and pitch it across. No, on second thought, don’t pitch it across. First, let them toss the money over. Then you throw it over, pick up the money and get the hell out of there.
I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope.
I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It’s astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.
I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
I found my first novel difficult. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
After a certain point, most people, including editors, will tell you everything you do is great.
A character has his own logic. He goes his way, one goes with him; he has some perceptions, one perceives them with him. You do him justice; you don’t grind your own axe.
I finished my first novel – it was around 300 pages long – when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn’t sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.
Never let a domestic quarrel ruin a day’s writing. If you can’t start the next day fresh, get rid of your wife.
When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn’t know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
Names are terribly important. I spend forever coming up with names. Sometimes a character doesn’t work until I change his name. In Bandits, Frank Matusi didn’t work. I changed him to Jack Delaney and suddenly he opened up.
It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You’re not even sure that it is possible to do.
Elaine, my beloved, is taking care of all the outside details to allow me the amount of free untroubled time every day to do my work. I can’t think of anything else necessary to a writer except a story and the will and the ability to tell it.
When I’m writing a book, sentence by sentence, I’m not thinking theoretically. I’m just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I’ve got.
I always know the ending; that’s where I start.
All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery – a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn’t.
There are two basic reactions. There are those who hate you because they think you put them in your book, and there are those who hate you because they think you didn’t put them in your book.
I had a hard time publishing my books in the beginning of my career, because editors were afraid what people would think of THEM, personally, if their name was associated with me.
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are not pulling the story.
Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title.
The truth is, we’ve not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult, the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.
As a younger man I wrote for eight years without ever earning a nickel, which is a long apprenticeship, but in that time I learned a lot about my trade.
Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.
I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, “Judy, we need a title.”
Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time…Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.
Even if I knew nothing would emerge from his book I would still write it. It seems to me that different organisms must have their separate ways of symbolizing, with sound or gesture, the creative joy – the flowering. And if this is so, men also must have their separate ways – some to laugh and some to build, some to destroy and yes, some even creatively to destroy themselves. There’s no explaining this. The joy thing in me has two outlets: one a fine charge of love toward the incredibly desirable body and sweetness of woman, and second – mostly both – the paper and pencil or pen.
I have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.
The fun is the creative stuff, when you’re sitting out there and you say, What the hell happens here! And all of a sudden Pow! And you’re just lifted out of your chair by it. That is sensational!
The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one’s encounter with it in a book.
Writing is, at best, a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.
When I read my first book, I started writing my first book. I have never not been writing.
I do know this: even though I’ve inferred otherwise, I do not write to discover myself. I think writers who delcare such a motive are guilty of fraud, although it is probably true for anybody that you never really know the precise nature of how you feel about something until you write your way into it and through it.
It must be told that my second work day is a bus as far as getting into the writing. I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them.
Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It’s really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.
Usually the recipe for a bestseller is to give people what they want. My challenge is and was: Give them what they do not expect. Be severe with them. The world of media is full of easy answers, wash-and-wear philosophies, instant ecstasies, what-me-worry epiphanies. Probably readers want a little more.
One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That’s what you wanted to write about, about what you didn’t know.
First drafts are learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge or enhance an idea, or reform it.
Here is his record for failure. From the time John Toland started writing for publication he produced six novels. None was published. He wrote twenty-five completed plays. None was produced. He wrote more than one hundred short stories before one was published. John Toland was forty-two years old before his first book was published. It was not until after twenty years of diligent writing and rewriting that he stumbled upon, or had thrust upon him, the one discovery that enabled him to become a success as an author of books.
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.
If you are lucky or talented enough to become in demand as a screenwriter, the amounts you are paid are so staggering, compared to real writing, that it’s bound to make you uneasy.
A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observations.
Anything that is written to please the author is worthless.
A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have.
In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax.
My point to young writers is to socialize. Don’t just go up to a pine cabin all alone and brood. You reach that stage soon enough anyway.
Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers I’d be a politician.
When I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it’s because we are still able to recognize one.
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read…It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
If someone deliberately sets out to write a best seller, what he is really saying is that he is going to write a book that will appeal to everyone. In essence, what he is looking for is the lowest common denominator. I believe when you try to appeal to everyone, the result is that you end up appealing to almost no one. Every good writer that I know writes to please himself, not to please others.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’ think what to do with the long winter evenings.
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
What use are writers to other writers? Really. You can have a good moan about your royalties and your rotten publishers and all the rest of it. That’s all they do. Writers talk about money to the exclusion of all other topics, including themselves.
I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of the day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the chosen possession of man.
One should never show an unfinished manuscript to anyone. You are sure to receive opinions contrary to some aspect of what you have written and such opinions, no matter how strong you are, may have a weakening effect upon that conviction you must sustain until your work is done. A book cannot be written by a committee. One must obey oneself alone and take one’s chances.
What no wife of a writer can understand is that a writer is working when he is staring out the window.
It strikes me now and then that talent may be one of the least important variables in the writing business. People without super-abundance of talent succeed anyhow. People with tons of talent never get anywhere. It happens all the time. And it happens, I guess, in every field or endeavor.
There is always something about success that displeases even your best friend.
Of all the abounding illusions one of the grandest may be the illusion possessed by a wide variety of people that ‘if only I can get a book published’ (or having secured a publisher’s commitment), ‘As soon as my book is published,’ their lives will pass from one stage of being to another, totally new, higher, sublime.
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not worth even what it might otherwise have been.
A writer judging his own work is like a deceived husband – he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.
It starts with what’s on the page. To me the biggest star of any film is what’s on the page – in other words, the writer. I don’t care who many actors or stars are in the picture, or who’s directing it or who’s producing it or what company’s releasing it – if it isn’t on the page, it’s not going to work. That’s your biggest star – your writer.
I’ve done as many as eighty drafts of one poem…I’ve found students shocked to learn that it can take me three years to finish a poem.
A southern writer named John Kennedy Toole wrote a comic novel about life in New Orleans called A Confederacy of Dunces. It was so relentlessly rejected by publishers that he killed himself. That was in 1969. His mother refused to give up on the book. She sent it out and got it back, rejected, over and over again. At last she won the patronage of Walker Percy, who got it accepted by the Louisiana State University Press, and in 1980 it won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing in this world is more common than men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Perseverance and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
I leave out the parts that people skip.
No novel is anything…unless the reader can sympathize with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages.
If you would understand you own age, read the works of fiction produced by it. People in disguise speak freely.
The main difference between marketing a book and marketing soap is that a book is a one-shot deal…and a book usually only has 90 days to make it or it’s dead.
By the nature of their profession they read too much, with the result that they grow jaded and cannot see talent when it dances in front of them.
The most unrestrained attacks have usually been directed at writers who succeed in reaching an enormous audience.
However great a man’s natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
We romantic writers are there to make people feel and not think. A historical romance is the only kind of book where chastity really counts.
I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He’s not a great mind, he’s not a great thinker, he’s not a great philosopher, he’s a storyteller.
A kid is a guy I never wrote down to. He’s interested in what I say if I make it interesting. He is also the last container of a sense of humor, which disappears as he gets older, and he laughs only according to the way the boss, society, politics, or race want him to. Then he becomes an adult. An adult is an obsolete child.
I want to make a book so simple in its difficult that a child can understand it. I want to go through it before it is typed and take out even the few adjectives I have let slip in. What then will the style be? I don’t know. Books establish their own pace. This I have found out. As soon as the story starts its style will establish itself.
The competition from the small presses, which have sprung up around the country, and which seem willing to take risks, as led some observers to conclude the New York publishing industry will eventually lose its primacy as a showcase for new talent and as an arbiter of literary taste. The rising cost of doing business in Manhattan, they argue, will force its firms to pursue only the most commercially promising manuscripts – blockbusters to sell through bookstore chains (1983).
I write because I’m afraid of dying and maybe there’s some chance some scattered bits of my work will live on after me and thereby frustrate Death.
This may be a painful pill for would-be Faulkners and Austens to swallow, and my last desire is to denigrate the miraculous processes by which raw inspiration is transmuted into literature. But I do have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe a book will make it merely because it’s good.
Certainly America is not overrun by great literary critics. The way I feel about reviews – my career has been made by them, because I have gotten mostly good reviews. I am always happy to get good reviews because I want people to buy my books. But by and large, with some exceptions, your good reviews are usually as stupid as your bad reviews.
There’s only one person a writer should listen to, pay any attention to. It’s not any damn critic. It’s the reader.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
With a large enough promotional budget, it is possible to make a best seller out of almost anything.
You have to keep writing, keep submitting, and keep praying to the god of whimsy that some editor will respond favorably.
Few of the major trade publishers will take a chance on a manuscript from someone whose name is not known.
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
My definition of a good editor is a man who I think charming, who sends me large checks, praises my work, my physical beauty, and my sexual prowess, and who has a stranglehold on the publishers and the bank.
It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
I don’t want to be studied in English classes; I want to be read.
To write a book that two successive generations of children might love, read twice, and put under their pillows at night, oh! What joy of joys, greater than showers of gold or wreaths of laurel!
Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.
Read as many of the great books as you can before the age of twenty-two.
A bad book is as much a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
What a heartbreaking job it is trying to combine authors for their protection! I had ten years of it on the Committee of Management of the Society of the Authors; and the first lesson I learned was that when you take the field for the authors you will be safer without a breastplate than without a backplate.
I think it can be dangerous for young writers to be modest when they’re young. I’ve known a number of truly talented writers who did less than they could have done because they weren’t vain and unpleasant enough about their talent. You have to take it seriously.
Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it, just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
I did not begin to write novels until I had forgotten all I had learned at school and college.
Almost all the great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the “passage from childhood to maturity,” the clash between the thrill of expectation, and the disillusioning knowledge of the truth. Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.
Publish, publish, whatever you can as early as possible. Not to be published as a novelist until you are 37 years old is devastating, a kind of living death. I’ll never get over it. It has left me with almost an excess of gratitude for any attention I get.
The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people. I’ve gotten back at lawyers, prosecutors, judges, law professors, and politicians. I just line ’em up and shoot ’em.
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature to those of us who really like to study people is that, in fiction, the author can really tell the whole truth without hurting anyone – or humiliating himself too much.
I write what I would like to read – what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says, “I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too,” I feel I have succeeded.
We will have to see whether the practicing through the years has prepared me for the writing of a book. For this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write. We shall see whether I am capable. Surely I feel humble in the face of this work.
I think poetry is like a diary: people don’t tend to write anything in it until something awful happens.
Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.
There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It’s a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.
Basically, it is a means of transmitting experience, feeling, and emotion so that one man can tell others, either in the present or in the future, something of the story of how men and women have lived and felt and thought.
I suspect that if any current product, be it an automobile, a vacuum cleaner, or whatever, were to be honestly described, there would be few takers. Books are no exceptions. You cannot permit them to come barefaced into being. They must be cosmetized, bewigged, perfumed, given padding where needed for the sake of appearance.
In the end it’s up to you. I’d say that in today’s tough publishing climate, you have to want to be a writer very, very much in order to succeed.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
Most critics are like woodpeckers who, instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk pecking holes in the bark to discover some little worm or other.
When novice writers ask my advice about getting published, one point I can’t emphasize too strongly is the importance of being absolutley relentless about submissions. Once you’ve got a story to the point where you think it’s worth submitting, you must submit it and submit it and submit it until someone somewhere breaks down and buys it.
Publishers are always on the lookout for a good book. This is something to keep in mind no matter how discouraging the prospect of finding a publisher is, no matter how many rejection slips you get, and no matter how overwhelming the odds seem.
I don’t know who was the more appalled: my former teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family who didn’t want to believe it.
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through – not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, this has not happened to me. The same blind effort, the straining and puffing go on in me. And always I hope that a little trickles through. This urge dies hard.
An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have somebody to look up to.
We’ve got 40,000 books published each year, and 90% of them are swill.
After something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore.
If I believed what they wrote, I’d have slit my wrists a long time ago. No one likes criticism. You want to be patted on the head and told you’re a good boy.
The best book is a collaboration between author and reader.
The poor novelist constructs his characters; he controls them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them function; he eavesdrops on them even before the knows them.
There are two tips I would offer beginning writers: 1-Writing for fame or fortune is a fool’s errand; 2-Write out of a passion, a caring, a need. The rest will follow.
The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt.
If you have other things in your life—family, friends, good productive day work—these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling it to the public.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
Screenwriting is the toughest craft, and when you write well, when you create a good story, people with characters that truly relate to each other, that evoke tears or laughter…then you can write your own ticket.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply in ways which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
There is no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money either.
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip or worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.
Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out in time.
As every publisher knows, good books – books of high literary or scholarly merit – fail as often, if not more often, than do books of questionable merit.
Literature is, perhaps, the most powerful of the arts.
Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration
Talent – genius, if you will – survives the most stringent oppression. Quality and distinction are in almost all cases recognized eventually. It’s only a matter of luck and timing (but the timing, unfortunately, can be way off).
Editors are extremely fallible people, all of them. Don’t put too much trust in them.
You’re there to be shot at, and that’s part of it.
Something awful happens to a person who grows up as a creative kid and suddenly finds no creative outlet as an adult.
William Saroyan was one of the most published writers in American letters. He worked in nearly every literary genre and has had tremendous success in each. I’m told that when he started writing and sending maunscripts, he began the practice of putting the rejection slips in a stack beside his desk. When he had his first acceptance, the stack of rejection slips was even with the top of his desk.
It is easy enough, once the commercial success of a book is an established fact, to work out a convincing reason for the public’s enthusiasm. But, before the fact has happened, the business is mysterious, chancy and unpredictable.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.
If you can’t see, touch, smell, hear, and understand the people you write about, the characters will be wooden figures, jumping like marionettes to the strings of your plot.
I’m no Joan Didion. There are no intelligent, unhappy people in my books. I want to be known as a writer of good entertaining narrative. I’m not trying to be taken seriously by the East Coast literary establishment. But I’m taken very seriously by the bankers.
The world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
In only rare cases do we know “for sure” what we have; almost all books perform above or below our expectations once they are published.
He (the writer) knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the walls of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on the wall – Kilroy was here – that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
Everyone thnks they can be a writer. Most people don’t understand what’s involved. The real writers persevere. The ones that don’t either don’t have enough fortitude and they probably wouldn’t succeed anyway, or they fall in love with the glamour of writing as opposed to the writing of writing.
On the brink of my (first) novel’s publication, I no longer feel as I’m standing in the shallows of an ocean. I’m standing on the edge of a ravine, holding a pebble, ready to toss it down and see if moments later, I hear a tiny plink! Chances are, as with all who stand on ravine edges, tossing pebbles, I’ll hear nothing. But if I do, what sound could be more thrilling?
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is where one hears the noise of battle. A good page of prose has the power to give grief or universality that lends itself to the most serious dialouge that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in this endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.
Every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyzes characters, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.
Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusting to write what the public wants, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standards, by refusing to write anything to order.
We are now fighting not for the book, but for attention. You are asking people to go into a bookstore because they’ve heard something about your book and then give five to ten hours of their time reading it. It’s a struggle to attract readers because of all of the other distractions in the country. You’re like a little child saying, “Listen to me, Mommy.” In a way it makes you feel slimy. You want your book to be discovered for itself, and instead you find yourself pleading for it.
Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He’d go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.
I cannot think of anybody who doesn’t need an editor, even though some people claim they don’t.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
