“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.
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.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
NORMAN MACLEAN, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
PHOTO: “The Tetons and the Snake River” (1942), Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, by Ansel Adams. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the National Park Service. (79-AAG-1)
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt” IMMANUEL KANT, A Critique of Pure Reason
Photo: “Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park, Montana, 1942″ by Ansel Adams
“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” EDGAR ALLAN POE
“My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart…” HARUKI MURAKAMI
“With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed–he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov’s story, ‘The Lady with the Dog.’” GRAHAM GREENE
“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.” ANN PATCHETT
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. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.” CICERO, Roman Philosopher (106 BC-46 BC)
Photo: Monica (mocachip), ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A very little key will unlock a very heavy door.” CHARLES DICKENS
Photo: Joyce 445, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.”
RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Big Sleep
Photo: “Fog, Sunset, Ocean — California” by Mike Behnken, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” VIRGINIA WOOLF
Adapted from theguardian.com: Novelist/essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and husband Leonard bought their house in Sussex, U.K., in 1919. Two years later, Woolf had a small writing room in the garden constructed out of a wooden toolshed below a loft. She wrote there in the summers, and liked it very much, though it was not ideal for concentration. She was always being distracted — by Leonard sorting the apples over her head in the loft, or the church bells at the bottom of the garden, or the noise of the children in the school next door, or the dog sitting next to her and scratching itself and leaving paw marks on her manuscript pages. In winter, it was often so cold and damp that she couldn’t hold her pen and had to retreat indoors. She wrote there with a board on her lap. In this writer’s lodge, Woolf wrote parts of all her major novels from Mrs Dalloway to Between the Acts, many essays and reviews, and many letters.
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