...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.
Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.
The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.
Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.
You must render: never report.
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Any work of art must first of all tell a story.
Good enough is never good enough.
We want someone to bring us the news.
The furthest out is the only place to be.
Tap into what you don't want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue.
The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude.
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go - not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.
The shot will go smoothly only when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder - that seems to give a kind of background to another's grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. ... The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
No ideas but in things.
Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.
Is the story developing an attitude or victimized by it.
There's hardly anywhere in literature where you don't find a triangle.
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