“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
— Saul Bellow (via)
quotes for writers
What “finished” means to a writer
“Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.”
The Wages of Worry
“It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.”
Katherine Anne Porter: This thing between me and my writing
This thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had — stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I’ve ever done.
Sontag: Uncertainties and anxieties
Here is the great difference between reading and writing. Reading is a vocation, a skill, at which, with practice, you are bound to become more expert. What you accumulate as a writer are mostly uncertainties and anxieties.
Susan Sontag, from Writers [On Writing]: Collected Essays from The New York Times (via)
Virginia Woolf: By hook or by crook
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Flannery O’Connor: The novel is way to have experience
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
Flannery O’Connor (via)
Updike’s reader
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.