Quotes to inspire and reflect

I REMEMBER [John] Gardner telling me, “Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system.”

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

“N EVER READ a book, Johnnie, and you will be a rich man.”

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.

You have to saturate yourself with English poetry in order to compose English prose.

The man who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

A sentence may be as long as the writer pleases, provided that he confines it to a single connected range of ideas, and by careful punctuation prevents the reader from finding it either tedious or confusing.

The author makes his readers, just as he makes his characters.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

There should be two main objects in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message, and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading—he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader … by either the author or the people in the tale. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate.

For the love of God don’t condescend! Don’t assume the attitude of saying, “See how clever I am, and what fun everybody else is!”

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

An author who assures you that he writes for himself alone and that he does not care whether he is heard or not is a boaster and is deceiving either himself or you.

If you have enough talent, you can get by after a fashion without guts, you can also get by, after a fashion again, without talent. But you certainly can’t get by without either .

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

A man of letters may have a mistress who makes books, but he must have a wife who makes shirts.

Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health.

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young.

The writer must be a psychologist, but a secret one; he must sense and know the roots of phenomena, but offer only the phenomena themselves as they blossom or wither.

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

I know everything. One has to, to write decently.

A paragraph should concern only one phase of a narrative or argument. This phase may be large or small, but must be self-contained.

Exclamation marks, also called “notes of admiration,” should be sparingly used. Queen Victoria used so many of them in her letters that a sentence by her that ends with a mere full-stop seems hardly worth reading.

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

The word “I’ll” should not be divided so that the “I” is on one line and “ ’ll” on the next. The reader’s attention, after the breaking up of “I’ll,” can never be successfully recaptured.

A story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence—especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled “Rain” pour in from across the nation.

Burn proofs when read. You shall have the book on publication .

Go to a big book store that has lots of poetry books. Look them over and see if you find any affinity groups that you like among the magazines and publishing groups, people you dig or who might dig your mind. Send them your stuff.

It is not wise to solicit the opinions of publishers—they become proud if you do.

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

It’s much more important to write than to be written about.

Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.

A boy has to peddle his book.

The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

I am convinced as a member of the reading public that bad [author] photographs are bad business. I have been put off reading books, which otherwise looked rather attractive, by the puss of the author printed on the back of the dust cover.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved; they do not understand that what interests you is the way in which you have created the illusion. Anthony Trollope ceased to be read for thirty years because he confessed that he wrote at regular hours and took care to get the best price he could for his work.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

It’s like making a movie: All sorts of accidental things will happen after you’ve set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you start to go with that; you get some footage of that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you’re watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

In the writing process, the more a thing cooks, the better.