Writers on Writing

 Here, from the pages of The Writer's Almanac, are some ideas on writing from a dozen of the best: 

Lynda Barry  “People think if you’re writing a story that you have to follow story structure. It’s like thinking the only reason we have teeth is because there are dentists.”

Tracey Chivalier  "Don't write about what you know — write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself — you aren't as interesting as you think."

Joan Didion "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

E.M. Forster  "The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves." He also said, "One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it."

Doris Kearns Goodwin, when asked why she continues to write presidential biographies, answered, “It is not a question of coming at it from the start as if I’m out to get them, or out to praise them. I just want them to come alive again. That’s all you can really ask of history. Then the reader can feel, with all of the complexity of emotions, what it is that is happening to them.”

Jane Hirschfield  “I don't think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn't just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live."

 

James Joyce  "The artist, like the God of the Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez  "What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it." 

Carson McCullers  "I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen."

Boris Pasternak  “I always dreamt of a novel in which, as in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world."

Philip Pullman  "I have always written what I wanted to write. I have never considered the audience for one second. Ever. It's none of their business what I write! Before publication, I am a despot."

J.D. Salinger  "What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while ... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

John Steinbeck  "The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."  In accepting the Nobel Prize, he said, “A writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

Edith Wharton  "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it."