Crafts Quotes - Page 22

• Wake the happy words.

  Theodore Roethke

  Theodore Roethke, Carolyn Kizer (2013). “On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose”, p.153, Copper Canyon Press

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• Make the drummer sound good.

  Steve Lacy

  Sound, Drummer

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• The secret is to start a story near the ending.

  Chris Offutt

  Secret, Stories

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• Art is elimination of the unnecessary.

  Waldo Salt

  Art, Unnecessary, Elimination

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• My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Sweat, August, Wind

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• I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

  John Steinbeck

  Writing, Stories, Chance

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• You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

  Larry McMurtry

  Country, Philosophy, Simple

  Larry McMurtry (2010). “Some Can Whistle”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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• I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

  Norman Mailer

  Dog, Sick, Mind

  Norman Mailer (1992). “Advertisements for Myself”, p.248, Harvard University Press

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• Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

  Arthur Quiller-Couch

  Writing, Pieces, Murder

  On the Art of Writing "On Style" (1916)

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• I was a young cat, and I was very fast, but I wasn't telling no kind of story.

  Roy Eldridge

  Cat, Stories, Kind

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• Are all your stars shining?

  J. D. Salinger

  Stars, Shining

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• Never be sincere - sincerity is the death of writing.

  Gordon Lish

  Writing, Sincerity, Sincere

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• Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

  Anthony Burgess

  Art, Wall, Hard Work

  Anthony Burgess (1986). “But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop, and Other Writings”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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• There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.

  Sam Shepard

  Writing, Acting, Division

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.

  Robert Bly

  Roots, Speak, Longing

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• Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Funny, Writing

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• Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Elderly, Advice

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• Sincerity is technique.

  W. H. Auden

  Technique, Sincerity

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• Remarks aren't literature.

  Gertrude Stein

  Literature, Remarks

  The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ch. 7 (1933)

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• Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

  T. S. Eliot

  Typewriters, Long, Modern

  T. S. Eliot (2011). “The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 1: 1898-1922”, p.240, Faber & Faber

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• In this art form, in any art form, generalities are useless.

  Zubin Mehta

  Art, Useless, Form

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• You learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.

  Ernest Gaines

  Moving, Athlete, Lines

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• Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.

  Red Smith

  Art, Writing, Typewriters

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• If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

  Anton Chekhov

  Art, Wall, Gun

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• Drama is a gun that doesn't go off.

  Jonis Agee

  Drama, Gun

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