February 2012
9 posts
I feel myself inhabited by a force or being—very little known to me. It gives...
– Jean Cocteau
January 2012
42 posts
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
– John Cheever
Expediency, you see, made me artful. My total work was built on a series of...
– Leon Edel
Selected Letters of William S. Burroughs →
I made a mistake in writing my first novel: all the characters I had introduced...
– Günter Grass
I could get into twenty-minute shouting matches over semicolons, because every...
– Robert Gottlieb
I am a mysteriously slow writer. I say “mysteriously” because there is no...
– Joseph Heller
Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for...
– E. B. White
Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all...
– David McCullough
If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there...
– William Styron
When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
– W. H. Auden
I can be funny—for one half-page at a time… I wouldn’t want to push my luck and...
– Joseph Heller
We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those...
– Haruki Murakami
Real wit is shown in language. We need language.
– Maya Angelou
If you were a fully realized person—whatever the hell that would be—you wouldn’t...
– William Gass
He who has nothing—it has been said many times—has nothing to lose but his...
– Pablo Neruda
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