Literature and Words

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 .

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.

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.

That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves.

If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

Naming your characters Aristotle and Plato is not going to make their relationship interesting unless you make it so on the page.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

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.

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he’s supposed to be doing.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

A novelist’s characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

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.

You can never know enough about your characters.

Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created—nothing.