Quotes to inspire and reflect

Readers of biographies like their meat rare.

It is 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.

A novel has to limit itself to the crew of a ship or a family; it’s not a great way to process a huge number of people.

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

Don’t put anything in a story that does not reveal character or advance the action.

The short story makes a modest appeal for attention, slips up on your blind side and wrassles you to the mat before you know what’s grabbed you.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

[The] three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful: 1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot. 2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it. 3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

The most solid advice … for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Be in love with yr life Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind Blow as deep as you want to blow Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

I don’t preach patience to you, but cynicism; it is the most comforting of philosophies. You will get over your present difficulties only to run into something worse, and so on until the last sad scene. Make up your mind to it—and then make the best of it. That is, do the best you can within the limits of your chance. If you can’t write a book a year, then write one every two years .

Everything goes by the board: honor, 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.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.

A note: despair at the badness of the book; can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord know the truth.

Bow down before them. They know what they are doing.

Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.

The editor is a specialist about reading. His specialty is what is sufficiently general and common between a possible readership and what the author has to say. The tool he works with is himself. If the author cannot reach him, he can’t reach the editor’s readership either.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

American writers drink when they are “blocked” and drunkenness—being a kind of substitute for art—makes the block worse.

Stick to Zen. Fuck the work .

Literature will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with; quit it in God’s name .

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.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

To write successful dialogue the author must have access to the mind of all his characters, but the reader must not perceive any more than he would in real life.

It’s a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

As soon Seek roses in December—ice in June; Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; Believe a woman or an epitaph, Or any other thing that’s false, before You trust in critics.

The best thing you can do about critics is never say a word. In the end you have the last say, and they know it.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic.… Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t.

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at only one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.

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.

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.

Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like—then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket.… Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously .

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.

Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.