#writing

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#approve #commit #die #kids #marry

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. ↗

— William Strunk, Jr.

#contain #drawing #lines #machine #paragraph

I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#being #class #directly #each #i

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts. ↗

— David Guterson

#fictional #finally #find #fits #history

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer. ↗

— David Guterson

#college #creative #creative writing #decided #i

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me. ↗

— David Guterson

#almost #basis #became #becoming #being

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become... ↗

— Joan Didion

#life

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#american #consider #creative #creative writing #culture

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#creative writing #creative writing programs #exist #france #idea

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#anybody #between #doing #else #exterior