“…at birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow the child with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Photo: This 1919 photo shows future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945; in office from 1933-1945), wife Eleanor, and five of their six children, along with Roosevelt’s mother Sara.
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900), Irish writer, poet, and legendary wit
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was…” ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Photo: Singer Rosemary Clooney (1928-2002), pictured in the 1950s, reads DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (1932) by Ernest Hemingway – a nonfiction book about Spanish bullfighting that is a “contemplation on the nature of fear and courage,” according to Wikipedia.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
ALBERT CAMUS, The Stranger (1942)
Born in French Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus — a novelist, journalist, and philosopher — was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” Camus’ other prominent works include the novels THE PLAGUE (1947) and THE FALL (1956).
In the photo above, actor Ryan Gosling is pictured with an edition of THE STRANGER originally released by Vintage in 1954.
Is this a great cover or what?
“Doesn’t it seem to you,” asked Madame Bovary, “that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?” GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary (1857)
Painting: “Young Woman at the Window, Sunset” by Henry Matisse (1921)
“Literature…is just entertainment like rock’n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn’t capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn’t work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that’s irrelevant if you’re not getting the reader on that level — moving a story.” T.C. BOYLE, novelist and short story writer
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” STEPHEN KING
“I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.” PETER DE VRIES
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” JACK LONDON
Painting: “Lightning” by Kevin Gritzke
April 30, 2013 marks the 68th birthday of Annie Dillard, best known as the author of PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard spent decades as a creative writing professor — and captured many of her insights in THE WRITING LIFE, a collection of short essays published in 1990.
Here are some excerpts from what I consider one of the best books about writing — for its insider tips, advice, inspiration, and motivation…
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.”
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!’”
“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”
THE WRITING LIFE is available at Amazon.com.
“Writing is something that you don’t know how to do. You sit down and it’s something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It’s beyond me, because you yourself don’t even know if you’re going to be able to…Sometimes I’ll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don’t go up there to write. The typewriter’s up there. If it doesn’t start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.” CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Illustration: Portrait of Charles Bukowski by Bradley Wind
