#writing

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. ↗

— Donald Barthelme

#writing #art

It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read. ↗

— Anita Brookner

#hares #market #read #time #tortoise

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#charge #checks #flying #insane #leaves

I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book. ↗

— Mercedes Lackey

#before #begin #book #broad #details

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#david-foster-wallace #desperation #love #mental-illness #self-confidence

See Everything, tolerate a lot and correct one thing at a time. ↗

— Saint Bernard

#life #patron-of-the-arts #writing #life

I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you've got to think of something, and then when you've thought of it you've got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That's all." ~ Mrs. Oliver ↗

— Agatha Christie

#writing-life #life

What is writing but an expression of my own life? ↗

— Zane Grey

#life #my own #own #writing

The most talented writer in the world is life itself and my books are alternative scenarios of what I read in it. ↗

— Barbara Rayne

#life #reading #writer #writing-books #writing-philosophy

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock. ↗

— William H. Gass

#short-stories #short-story #symbols #writing #life