Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Art:
Writing
& Writers
-
- “Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle
souls. For, thus friends absent speak.”
-
John Donne
- Tom
Schulman, Dead Poets Society: "We don't
read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members
of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business,
engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.
But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from
Whitman, 'O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of
the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?'
Answer. That you are here -- that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes
on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a
verse. What will your verse be?"
- F.
Scott Fitzgerald: "To have something to say is a question of sleepless
nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless
trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise
you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better.
But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of
many thousands of journalists."
- William
Faulkner: "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. An artist
is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and
he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow,
beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only
responsibility is to his art."
"He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid;
and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for
anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking
which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and
compassion and sacrifice."
- Ray
Bradbury: "I often ask people what is their definition of a 'writer.'
They usually tell me: 'Somebody who has published books or articles' or 'A person who
makes their living by writing.' I disagree. I think somebody who writes everyday and looks
at the workaday world through the prism of literature and words is a writer. Period. If a person everyday honestly strives to get at the heart of a matter and
glean the truth out of the complexity of this world and we human beings through the
written word, than that person is a writer, in my opinion. It is a matter of
attitude and a way of life, not how you pay your bills or whether you have talent or not.
"To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most
sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.
"You must write every single day of your life.
"You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in
beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.
"You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like
perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
"I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I
wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.
"May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or
otherwise.
"Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next
20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
- Ralph
Waldo Emerson: "Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man
behind the book."
- John
Steinbeck, advice for beginning writers:
"Dear Writer:
"Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at
Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and
prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short
stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short
story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be
taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form,
as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the
world.
"The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story
to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of
its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.
A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all -- so
long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the
writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise
we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know
it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
"So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we
were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some
abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence,
the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized,
the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher's side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips,
in the hundreds of rejection slips.
"It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why
could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories
dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories
and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever
been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey
something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may
sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence
that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only
an ineffective story.
"It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written,but, after many years,
to start a story still scares me to death.I will go so far as to say that the writer who
not scared ishappily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
"I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was
during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to
try and to be a writer.
"I was told, 'It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it
would be better if you could go to Europe.'
"'Why?' I asked.
"'Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder
whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.'
"It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it
was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But
surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time --
a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
"She told me it wouldn't.
- Joseph
Conrad: "[The artist] speaks to our capacity for
delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of
pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to
the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in
aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear... which binds together all humanity - the
dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
- Paul
Johnson, Intellectuals: "...Hemingway's awareness of his
inability to recapture his genius, let alone develop it, accelerated the spinning circle
of depression and drink. He was a man killed by his art, and his
life holds a lesson all intellectuals need to learn: that art is not enough."
- Baron
de Montesquieu: "Author:
a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on
tormenting generations to come."
- W.H. Auden: "How
do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
- Richard Bach: "A
professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
- Winston Churchill: "Writing
is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress,
then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are
about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the
public."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: "We
are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he
originates."
- W. Somerset Maugham:
"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they
are."
- Flannery O'Connor: "Everywhere
I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't
stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good
teacher."
- Pablo Picasso:
"Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint
rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a
person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have
preferred to use brushes and colors."
- Burton Rascoe: "What
no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out
of the window."
- Henry David Thoreau:
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
- Mark Twain: "The
difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between
lightning and the lightning bug."
- Maxwell Anderson: "The story ... must be a conflict, and
specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person."
- Sherwood Anderson: "When a man publishes a book, there are
so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost
always worse than the criticism."
- Matthew Arnold: "Have something to say, and say it as
clearly as you can. That is the only secret."
- Isaac Asimov: "Rejection slips, or form letters, however
tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil - but
there is no way around them."
- Cecilia Bartholomew: "Writer's have two main problems. One is
writer's block, when words won't come at all, and the other's logorrhea, when words come
so fast that they hardly get to the wastebasket in time."
- Robert Graves: "The
art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its
inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what
is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that
virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope."
- Eugene Delacroix: "What moves men of genius, or rather what
inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has
already been said is still not enough."
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