“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life – the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”
~ Doris Lessing
“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.” ~ John Steinbeck
“I never set out to write a whole book about my dog Colter, much less two books, but he was such a force, such a marvelous animal and taught me so much — about hunting, certainly, but about barely controllable and indomitable passion as well — that in his absence my pen has been moving and even now has not yet ceased.”
Rick Bass
A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It’s what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it’s also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths. Some don’t even know they’ve screened this nerve from their own gaze, let alone another’s. Some crudely mistake confession for introspection. Others, more cunning perhaps, open tempting shortcuts and roundabout passageways, the better to mislead everyone. Some can’t tell whether they’re writing to strip or hide that secret nerve.
“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
~ Gustave Flaubert
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way.”
~ E.L Doctorow
“I am an invisible man.”
~ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
~ J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
