Essay Archives
- “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” - Yogi Berra
- "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard
- "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done." - Steven Wright
- "No one can tell you when to start and how to stop, either. And only you can put it off until there are no more tomorrows." - Susan Bono
- "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how . . . . We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." - Agnes de Mille, dancer and choreographer
- “The one thing all nations share is the fear that a member of the family will want to be an artist.” - Robert Frost
- If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage. - Cynthia Ozick
- I'm beside myself with grief.
- "You're gonna buy gifts. Buy books!"
- “Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to stay a writer” - Harlan Ellison
- “Action expresses priorities.” - Mahatma Gandhi
- “James Blish told me I had the worst case of ‘said bookism’ (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary."
- Anne McCaffrey
- “What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life." - Dorothy Allison
- "Isaac gave good advice to authors. . . . [H]e sent me his two laws of writing: 1. Thou shall finish what thou startest. 2. Thou shalt not judge thyself." - Janet Jeppson Asimov,
_Notes for a Memoir on Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing_
- "A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." - Jerry Seinfeld
- "The important thing [in writing memoir], is not the life, but the meaning extracted from it." - Ellen Boneparth
- "Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you–if you don't play, you can't win." - Robert Heinlein, science fiction author (1907 - 1988)
- "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." - Robert Frost
- “Can't Think, Brain Dumb, Inspiration Won't Come! Poor Ink, Bum Pen, Best Wishes, Amen.” - Unknown
- "Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you." - Bernard Malamud, interviewed for _The Writer's Desk_ by Jill Krementz
- “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
- "I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I really meant." - Robert McCloskey
- "No one can help you if you’re stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities." - Annie Dillard
- In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball. - Neil Simon
- "Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do about it."
- Maxwell Perkins
- "I wrote from a sense of need. I needed something to do. You can't just sleep all day long."
- Snoopy
- "Be regular and orderly in your life lke a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work." - Gustave Flaubert
- "Wear the old coat and buy the new book." - Austin Phelps
- "The easiest thing to do on earth is not write." - William Goldman
- "Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs."
- David Ben Gurion
- "When action grows unprofitable, gather information;
when information grows unprofitable, sleep."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- “The first draft of anything is shit.” - Ernest Hemingway
- “If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."
- Isaac Asimov
- “I learned to make my mind large, like the universe is large, so there is room for paradoxes.”
-Maxine Hong Kingston
- "Action expresses priorities." - Mahatma Gandhi
- “Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the only thing you have to offer.”
- Barbara Kingsolver
- “The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”
- Ellen Goodman, American journalist (1941 - )
- “A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head." - Ethel Wilson
- "I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into cream?" - Katherine Patterson
- “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time. . . The wait is simply too long.” - Leonard Bernstein
- “I never gained control of my mind - how do you dominate an ocean? - but I began to form a relationship with it.” - Natalie Goldberg in Thunder & Lightning
- "Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- “I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.” - Dorothy Allison.
- "To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are."
- Sholem Asch (1880-1957) Yiddish novelist and dramatist
- "Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
- "Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. The enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft."
- Anne LaMott from Bird by Bird
- "To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers.
One who does not vote has no right to complain." - Louis L'Amour
- “I knew I had to write the truth. We feel a tremendous relief when someone tells the truth.”
- Natalie Goldberg, commenting on her new memoir,
The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely to Truth
- "I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate."
- George Burns
- "Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else."
- Mignon Mclaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook
- "The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster."
- R.M. Kanton
- ". . . out of the mountains that you write some molehills will be published."
- Brenda Ueland (1891 - 1985) If You Want to Write
- "An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations."
- Charles de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)
- "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
- Jack London
- "Never hope more than you work."
- Beryl Markham quoting her father in West with the Night
- "Show me your original face before you were born." - Zen Koan
- "What no wife [or husband] of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out a window."
- Burton Rascoe
- "Structure is everything."
- Natalie Goldberg
- "I'm not a good shot, but I shoot often." - Theodore Roosevelt
- “I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on."
- Rita Dove
- “I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.”
- Don DeLillo
- ". . . [writing] is your friend. It will never desert you, though you may desert it many times. The writing process is a constant source of life and vitality." - Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones
- "The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them."
- "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."
- Oscar Wilde
- "Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self."
-Cyril Connolly
- "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
- "You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts." - Nikki Giovanni
- The first issue of WRITE (now) NEWSLETTER.
