Art

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

The best technique is none at all.

It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir , a decorative litterateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and coquettes. Handel had power.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

One of the great rules of art: do not linger.

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.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

Darling, this is the trap: BELIEVE YOU ARE GOOD WHEN THEY TELL YOU YOU ARE GOOD AND YOU ARE THEREBY DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. Dead forever. Art is a day by day game of living and dying and if you live a little more than you die you are going to continue to create some pretty fair stuff, but if you die a little more than you live, you know the answer .

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

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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

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.

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.

I don’t like to throw characters into a plot as though it were a raging torrent where they are swept along. What interests me are the complications and nuances of character. Few of my characters are described externally; we see them from the inside out.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Philosophy is the highest music.