#writers

Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream. ↗

— L.L. Barkat

#novel-writing #writers #writing #dreams

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#poetic #poetry #prose #writers #equality

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#poets #work #writers #writing #equality

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off. ↗

— William H. Gass

#literary-criticism #living-writers #poetry #prose #equality

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer. ↗

— Verlyn Klinkenborg

#editing #reading #writers #writing #experience

Although there are those who wish to ban my books because I have used language that is painful, I have chosen to use the language that was spoken during the period, for I refuse to whitewash history. The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family. I remember the pain. ↗

— Mildred D. Taylor

#mississippi-writers #family

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant. ↗

— Matthew Joseph Bruccoli

#friendship #hemingway #writers #friendship

Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? ↗

— Colson Whitehead

#brooklyn #funny #writers #funny

...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out. ↗

— David Rakoff

#artists #humor #rent #wilde #writers

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#education #hurt #writers-on-writing #art