Nita Sweeney

  • Essay Archives

    August 2008

    • “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” - Yogi Berra

    July 2008

    • "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard

    June 2008

    • "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done." - Steven Wright

    May 2008

    • "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

    April 2008

    • "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

    March 2008

    • “The one thing all nations share is the fear that a member of the family will want to be an artist.” - Robert Frost

    February 2008

    • If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage. - Cynthia Ozick

    January 2008

    • I'm beside myself with grief.

    December 2007

    • "You're gonna buy gifts. Buy books!"

    November 2007

    • “Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to stay a writer” - Harlan Ellison

    October 2007

    • “Action expresses priorities.”          - Mahatma Gandhi

    September 2007

    • “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

    August 2007

    • “What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life."                                                                                               - Dorothy Allison

    July 2007

    • "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_

    June 2007

    • "A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." - Jerry Seinfeld

    May 2007

    • "The important thing [in writing memoir], is not the life, but the meaning extracted from it." - Ellen Boneparth

    April 2007

    • "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)

    March 2007

    • "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." - Robert Frost

    February 2007

    • “Can't Think, Brain Dumb, Inspiration Won't Come! Poor Ink, Bum Pen, Best Wishes, Amen.”   - Unknown

    January 2007

    • "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

    December 2006

    • “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

    November 2006

    • "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

    October 2006

    • "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

    September 2006

    • 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

    August 2006

    • "Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do about it."
                    - Maxwell Perkins

    July 2006

    • "I wrote from a sense of need. I needed something to do. You can't just sleep all day long."
                          - Snoopy

    June 2006

    • "Be regular and orderly in your life lke a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work."                     - Gustave Flaubert

    May 2006

    • "Wear the old coat and buy the new book." - Austin Phelps

    April 2006

    • "The easiest thing to do on earth is not write." - William Goldman

    March 2006

    • "Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs."
                                                                                      - David Ben Gurion

    February 2006

    • "When action grows unprofitable, gather information;
      when information grows unprofitable, sleep."
                - Ursula K. Le Guin

    January 2006

    • “The first draft of anything is shit.” - Ernest Hemingway

    December 2005

    • “If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."
             - Isaac Asimov

    November 2005

    • “I learned to make my mind large, like the universe is large, so there is room for paradoxes.”
            -Maxine Hong Kingston

    October 2005

    • "Action expresses priorities." - Mahatma Gandhi

    September 2005

    • “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

    August 2005

    • “The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”
      - Ellen Goodman, American journalist (1941 - )

    July 2005

    • “A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head." - Ethel Wilson

    June 2005

    • "I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into cream?" - Katherine Patterson

    May 2005

    • “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

    April 2005

    • “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

    March 2005

    • "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.

    February 2005

    • “I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.” - Dorothy Allison.

    January 2005

    • "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

    December 2004

    • "Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein

    November 2004

    • "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

    October 2004

    • "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

    September 2004

    • “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

    August 2004

    • "I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate."

      - George Burns

    July 2004

    • "Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else."

      - Mignon Mclaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook

    June 2004

    • "The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster."

      - R.M. Kanton

    May 2004

    • ". . . out of the mountains that you write some molehills will be published."

      - Brenda Ueland (1891 - 1985) If You Want to Write

    April 2004

    • "An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations."

      - Charles de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)

    March 2004

    • "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

      - Jack London

    February 2004

    • "Never hope more than you work."
      - Beryl Markham quoting her father in West with the Night

    January 2004

    • "Show me your original face before you were born." - Zen Koan

    December 2003

    • "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

    November 2003

    • "Structure is everything."

      - Natalie Goldberg

    October 2003

    • "I'm not a good shot, but I shoot often." - Theodore Roosevelt

    September 2003

    • “I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on."

      - Rita Dove

    August 2003

    • “I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.”

      - Don DeLillo

    July 2003

    • ". . . [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

    June 2003

    • "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."

    May 2003

    • "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

    April 2003

    • "Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self."
      -Cyril Connolly

    March 2003

    • "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
      - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

    February 2003

    • "You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts." - Nikki Giovanni

    January 2003

    • The first issue of WRITE (now) NEWSLETTER.
    Last modified: February 3, 2006 @ 11:59 am