100 quotes that helped me write
From last year’s commonplace diary
Hey y’all,
I spent all of last year trying to write a book, so a good deal of the entries in my commonplace diary were somehow related to writing. (When you’re writing, everything is related to writing.) I picked 100 of them and stitched them together for today’s letter:
“Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin!”
—Donald Barthelme
“It’s clear to me now that nothing can save us from the crisis of beginning.”
—Elizabeth Cooperman"Beginnings are such delicate times.”
—Frank Herbert, Dune
“I love when a book just starts, without any attempt to justify itself. Books should just start!”
—Elisa Gabbert
”Now the monkey jumps into the water.”
—old Hungarian saying
“You just got to put in the work. That’s all it is. If you watch enough Rocky movies – and there are six of them, three of them are really f—king good – anytime Rocky tried to take a shortcut in training, he got his ass whooped. And, you know, Rocky III, he’s in a nice gym and the girls are there kissing his muscles and all that bulls—t, and Mr. T beats the s—t out of him and then he has to go in the dirty gym with the black guys. There’s no shortcut.”
—Chris Rock
“Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.”
—John Gregory Dunne
“There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.”
— William Faulkner
"Craft is too grand and foreign a word to describe what gets done most days in your pajamas."
—Zadie Smith“I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is s—t. I’m just trying to make the best s—t I can.”
—Percival Everett
“Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”
—Bill Murray, The French Dispatch
“Keep typing until it turns into writing.”
—David Carr
“Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
“You can’t write differently, even if you want to. You just have to be able to notice when you are boring yourself.”
—Adam Phillips
“Somebody’s boring me—I think it’s me.”
—Dylan Thomas
“A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.”
—Bert Taylor“I see no reason why I shouldn’t write about myself. I find the subject as interesting as Napoleon or Alexander the Great.”
—Richard Strauss
“I’m thinking of Leonard Nimoy’s spiritual journey from writing I Am Not Spock (1975) to writing I Am Spock (1995). This is a journey we all must make.”
—Tim Kreider
“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the universe, which runs through himself and all things.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The fact is one's own voice is not heard anywhere else. It's a challenge to be yourself. It takes a lot of courage.”
—Yusef Lateef
“The things you do badly are as much part of your style as the things you do well.”
—Martin Scorsese
“I always think of style as something that’s the distance between what you want something to look like, and what your hand and brain make it look like unintentionally. And there’s quite a gap there, and there’s some interesting stuff in that gap.”
—Daniel Clowes
“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand.
—Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers”
—Saul Steinberg
“Nothing can be rushed. It must grow, it should grow of itself…”
—Klee
"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he set out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits…”
— Simone Weil
“I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was ‘not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life."”
—Dani Shapiro, Still Writing
“If I had one thing to say to artists, it would be to be patient. And to be ignorant of what you think you know. If you don’t get the answer that you were expecting, maybe that’s a good thing. Knowing what you’re doing is overrated.”
— Pope.L
“You never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done. That is why so many talented people stop writing. It’s hard to tolerate this not-knowing.”
—Jenny Offill
“Each book has to teach you how to write it.”
—Salman Rushdie
“You have no right to assume that you'll be able to write because you could write yesterday. On the other hand, when there are dark times, you can say, I've faced this before. You learn that you will always have to mark time, that you shouldn't rush, that if you wait, the book will come to you. But you only build up this knowledge through long experience. Your daily work is very much about the line, the paragraph. It's not about the grand design of your career.”
—Hilary Mantel
“Dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.”
—William Blake
“Black Rain, my first action movie, was original but only by virtue of my own stupidity. My lack of knowledge made it original.”
—Hans Zimmer
“When you don’t know what you’re doing, you make some wonderful mistakes.”
— Peter Hook, on New Order
“Self employment, for me at least, is a never-ending contest between the world’s worst manager and the world’s laziest employee.”
—Daniel Akst
“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. The writer’s audience is always a fiction.”
—William Ong, Orality and Literary“From now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer’s world.”
—George Orwell, 1940
“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
—Romans 12:2 KJV“After one look at this planet, any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager!’”
—William S. Burroughs“What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?”
—Bob Dylan
”The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
— Eden Phillpotts“Our problems remain exactly as serious throughout all of life’s stages: just barely greater than our ability to meet them, or else they wouldn’t be problems.”
—Tim Kreider
“Everything here is so mixed up, nothing’s connected any more, and sometimes I very much doubt whether anyone in the future will be interested in all my tosh.”
—Anne Frank
"The impulse is always, what do you feel most confused about and most unsure about. You can assume that others like you are having similar doubts. As I've always said, your job is to preach to the converted. That's what preachers are supposed to talk about. It's not the things we know are true, but the things were worried might not be true, that contravene our faith. That's the place to go. Anything good comes from a place of unknowing.”
—Tony Kushner
"…tracking truth by ear, stalking surprise, not knowing what I have to say until I’ve said it…"
-Peter Schjeldahl
“No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
—Robert Frost
“We don’t write what we know exactly, but rather we write to know. Writing in that sense becomes better understood as a kind of prayer, a kind of inquiry, something best done over time, repetitively, day after day.”
—Anthony Doerr
“One of my former husbands remarked that when I had a good day writing, I looked like a Catholic who had seen the pope.”
—Louise Glück
“It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much."
—Leonard Woolf
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