WRITING

  
It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anybody finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author's intention -- he did not want to be understood by just "anybody." Every more noble spirit and taste selects its audience when it wishes to communicate itself; and choosing them, it at the same time erects barriers against "the others." All the more subtle laws of any style have their origins at this point: they at the same time keep away, create distance, forbid "entrance," understanding ... while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours.

-- Nietzsche

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Tell only a small part of what you could tell, and imply the rest. I know one is always tempted to put down everything and that's all right as long as one takes most of it out afterwards, leaving only the elements absolutely necessary to the piece of writing, those things which are essential, in order to make one's point, and without which the piece would suffer. I'm sure you agree that knowing what to include and excise is all-important.

-- Paul Bowles, in a letter to Joel Redon

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Skillful autobiographers -- the Maya Angelous, let's say, or the Frank Conroys -- invest the "I" with just enough plasticity so that the persona becomes both subject and object. They excavate the quirkiest self and locate it in history; their memories combine the inner and the outer, the literal and the metaphoric.

-- Bharati Mukherjee

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When you portray miserable wretches and unlucky people and want to stir the reader to compassion, try to be cooler -- to give their sorrow a background, as it were, against which it can stand out in sharper relief. The way it is, the characters weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold.

-- Anton Chekhov 
WRITING

What distinguishes a character on stage from a "real" person? Obviously the fact that the former stands before us as a fully articulated whole. Our fellow men we always perceive only in fragmentary fashion, and our power of self-observation is usually reduced, by vanity and cupidity, to zero. What we call "dramatic illusion" is, therefore, the paradoxical phenomenon that we know more about the mental processes of a Hamlet than about our own inner life. For Shakespeare shows not only the deed but also its motives and indeed more perfectly than we ever see them together in real life. 

-- Peter Richard Rohden

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Generally speaking, I don't believe in kindly humor -- I don't think it exists. One of the most shameful utterances to stem from the human mouth is Will Rogers's "I never met a man I didn't like." The absolute antithesis is Oscar Wilde on the fox-hunting Englishman: "The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable." Wilde's remark contains, in briefest span, the truth, whereas Rogers's is pure flatulence, crowd-pleasing and fake humility.

-- S. J. Perelman

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There are certain emotions that are useful for the construction of a text, and some are too small. Anger is too tiny an emotion to use when you're writing, and compassion is too sloppy. Almost everything that makes you want to write, or feel like writing, is not useful in the act of writing. So it's the mediation between those two states, the compulsion and all those feelings, that makes you compelled.

The controlling image is useful because it determines the language that informs the text. Once I know what the shape of the scar is, once I know that there are two patches of orange in the quilt, then I can move. Once I have the controlling image, which can also work as the metaphor -- that is where the information lodges.

-- Toni Morrison 
WRITING

The family of Finch Hatton, of England, have on their crests a device Je responderay, "I will answer." ... I liked this old motto so much that I asked Denys...if I might have it for my own. He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular. The first...was its high evaluation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue -- you may stroke them or you may strike them, you will get no more echo from them than from a block of wood. And how, then, can you yourself go on speaking?...Secondly I liked the Finch Hatton device for its ethical content. I will answer for what I say or do; I will answer to the impression I make. I will be responsible.

-- Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

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We should have felt it to be not merely wrong but unpleasant not to work every morning for seven days a week and for about eleven months a year. Every morning, therefore, at about 9:30 after breakfast each of us, as if moved by a law of unquestioned nature, went off and 'worked' until lunch at 1. 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 diabilities, Virginia was able to produce so much.

-- Leonard Woolf

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If you write for God, you will reach many men and women and bring them joy. If you write for other men and women, you may make some money and give someone a little joy, and you may make a noise in the world for only a little while. If you write for yourself, you can't read what you have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted by it you will wish that you were dead.

-- Thomas Merton