The faster I write, the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I am pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
RAYMOND CHANDLER
Archives for category: Writer’s Quotes
“Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.” HENRY MILLER, American writer (1891-1980)
Painting: Henry Miller portrait, watercolor by Fabrizio Cassetta. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.
FOLLOW YOUR BLISS
by Joseph Campbell
Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn’t know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.
IMAGE: Portrait of Joseph Campbell by Robert Wolverton, Jr. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was an American mythologist, writer, and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow your bliss.” (Read more at wikipedia.org)
“A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him and whom he will miss terribly.” PABLO NERUDA
Illustration: Wall Art in Valparaiso, Chile — photo by Janet Rudolph, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird’s distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.”
GEORGE SAUNDERS, “Escape from Spiderhead”
“Escape from Spiderhead” appears in George Saunders‘ collection TENTH OF DECEMBER (Random House, 2013), available at Amazon.com.
“In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer, and I take up my pen to write.” PEARL S. BUCK (1892-1973), winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature
Photo: Pearl S. Buck with paper and pen, 1950s.
The most useful thing about art is its uselessness…My point is that there’s a place–an important place, as a matter of fact–in our all too pragmatic world for the impractical and the non-essential, and that art occupies that place more gloriously than does just about anything else: occupies it with such authority and with such inspirational if quixotic results that we find ourselves in the contradictory position of having to concede that the non-essential can be very essential, indeed, if for no other reason than that an environment reduced to essentials is a subhuman environment in which only drones will thrive.”
TOM ROBBINS, excerpted from “What Is Art and If We Know What Art Is, What Is Politics?” found in Wild Ducks Flying Backward: Short Writings of Tom Robbins (Bantam, 2005)
Photo: Tom Robbins
Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.” DENIS JOHNSON, Train Dreams
writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
ART: “Bukowski” by iddoggy. Stickers available at redbubble.com.
writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all” CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Illustration: “Bukowski” by skroowtape
Silver Birch Press 