Crafts Quotes - Page 23

• Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.

  Theodore Roethke

  Real, Lines, Fool

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• You don't want to OD on improvisation.

  Patti Smith

  Want, Improvisation

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• Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

  Willa Cather

  Art, Writing, Breakfast Food

  Willa Cather (1988). “Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art”, p.103, U of Nebraska Press

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• What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.

  William H. Gass

  Stories, Want, Screws

  William H. Gass (1997). “Finding a Form: Essays”, p.46, Cornell University Press

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• I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

  William Styron

  Thinking, Evil, Fiction

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• All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

  Peter Carey

  Hero, Stories

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• I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

  Ethan Canin

  Ambition, Thinking, Fiction

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• But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.

  Diane Johnson

  Jobs, Writing, Understanding

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• Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.

  William H. Gass

  Literature, Pennies, Quarters

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• The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.

  Gabriel Fielding

  Giving Up, Writing, Habit

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• Nobody wants to see the village of the happy people.

  Lew Hunter

  People, Village, Want

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• You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.

  Samuel Goldwyn

  Home, Scene

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• Always make room for the unexpected in yourself.

  Steve Martin

  Rooms, Unexpected

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• In art economy is always beauty.

  Henry James

  Beauty, Art, Editing

  The Altar of the Dead preface (1909)

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• Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

  Eudora Welty

  Character, Somewhere Else, Would Be

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• Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.

  Wallace Stegner

  Taught, Talent, Awakened

  Wallace Stegner (2002). “On Teaching and Writing Fiction”, p.46, Penguin

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• Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

  Donald Hall

  Hard Work, Writing, Desire

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• Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

  Richard Wilbur

  Mind, Steps, Blank

  Richard Wilbur, William Butts (1990). “Conversations with Richard Wilbur”, p.109, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

  William Stafford

  Serious, Jokes

  William Stafford (1978). “Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation”

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• There is one story and one story only.

  Robert Graves

  Stories

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.73, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• You have to talk to the stone, and it has to talk to you.

  Ben Nighthorse Campbell

  Stones

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• A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off. ... Indeed, this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge - I find one of the great advantages of the novel-form ... this intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the experiences we receive.

  E. M. Forster

  Running, Views, Long

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• The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.

  Percy Lubbock

  Art, Thinking, Novelists

  Percy Lubbock (2007). “The Craft of Fiction”, p.55, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• [T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Issues, Political

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• There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Writing, Nine, Way

  Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads (1893) "In the Neolithic Age"

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