| All
of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers
that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
And there are trickles like Jean Rhys. All that
matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The
lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake. |
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-- Jean Rhys, in an interview in The Paris Review (No. 76, Fall 1979)
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|
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| If
you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together
to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and
work, but rather teach them to long for the endless
immensity of the sea. |
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-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wisdom of the Sands: Spiritual Science (University of Chicago Press, 1979; originally published as Citadelle, 1948)
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| The
difficulty of literature is not to write, but to
write what you mean; not to affect your reader,
but to affect him precisely as you wish. |
|
-- Robert
Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque (1881)
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|
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| [T]he real meaning of that misused word "inspiration" is not that the writer waits for inspiration and then writes like crazy, but rather that it's sweatingly, dreadfully hard work, and while you're writing, something drops from the study ceiling. |
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-- Mary
Stewart, New York Times Book Review, September
2, 1979
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|
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| One
should challenge accepted thinking, particularly
one's own. |
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-- Edward
Weston
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|
|
| Sufficient
for the morning is the pleasure thereof, and one
of the most unfailing pleasures is to sit down in
the morning and write. |
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-- Leonard
Woolf, Autobiography, vol. 5 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969)
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|
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| [W]hen
and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall
try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling
around fat heads. |
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-- Philip
Wylie, Opus 21 (New York: Rinehart, 1949)
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Copyright © 2004 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.
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