Quotes by Essayists - Page 100

Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn't a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.
John Crowley
What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There can be no forced inspiration.
Dejan Stojanovic
What is more yours than what always holds you back?
James Richardson
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
Virginia Woolf
We are wiser than we know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.
José Martí
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing.
Adam Gopnik
Until you know who you are you can’t write.
Salman Rushdie
There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
E B White
If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102
Joseph Joubert
I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.
Edmund White
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is useful.
Edmund White
W jakimś sensie takie osoby jak ona, te, które władają piórem, bywają niebezpieczne. Narzuca się od razu podejrzenie fałszu - że taka osoba nie jest sobą, tylko okiem, które bezustannie patrzy, a to, co widzi, zamienia w zdania; w ten sposób okrawa rzeczywistość ze wszystkiego, co w niej najważniejsze, z niewyrażalności.
Olga Tokarczuk
I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.
Ayi Kwei Armah
Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.
Nick Hornby
Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.
Pico Iyer
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.
Edward Abbey
He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.
Virginia Woolf
[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.
Edward Abbey
There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched Medelin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everyting has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture.
Chuck Klosterman
What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.
Edward Abbey
Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.
Edward Abbey
Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.
E B White
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own.
Dejan Stojanovic
To write good poems is the secret of brevity.
Dejan Stojanovic
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
David Foster Wallace
To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.
Steve Almond
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.
Richard Rodríguez
So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them
William H. Gass
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass
The paper is patient, but the reader is not.
Joseph Joubert
Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.
Jorge Luis Borges
Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
Flannery O'Connor
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
Virginia Woolf
I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.
Monique Truong
All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own.
Monique Truong
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
Thomas de Quincey
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.
William Styron
I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
Roland Barthes
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.
Barbara Kingsolver
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
David Foster Wallace
The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.
Jorge Luis Borges
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass
One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
Niyi Osundare
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
Jorge Luis Borges
The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
William Hazlitt
I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.
Nick Hornby
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H.L. Mencken
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valéry
However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.
Virginia Woolf
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
Virginia Woolf
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
Salman Rushdie
A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream.
Dejan Stojanovic