writers quote daily

Greene on remembering story

So much of a novelist's writing takes place in the unconscious, in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. --Graham Greene

Lewis on why we write

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. --C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image

Didion on keeping a notebook

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking . . . . Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardnenig and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.

Lucas on sound and rhythm

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears. --F. L. Lucas, Style

Eliot on the feel of language

This is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word. --T.S. Eliot

Hemingway on writing

You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you hae communicated the emotion, the sights and sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you as you read them, so many times have you re-read them. By the time the book comes out you will have started something else and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. --Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

Wheelock on editors

The function of an editor . . . is to serve as a skilled objective outsider, a critical touchstone by recourse to which a writer is enabled to sense flaws in surface or structure, to grasp and solve the artistic or technical problems involved, and thus to realize completely his own owrk in his own way. --John Hall Wheelock, Editor to Author

Connealy on Rejection

Take all your rejection letters and mush them up with glue and use them to paper mache yourself a thick hide. You'll need one to survive as a writer. --Mary Connealy

Aristotle on plot

Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions--what we do--that we are happy or the reverse . . . All human happiness and misery take the form of action. --Aristotle, The Poetics

Roth on beginning a book

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in a predicament is what I have to begin with. --Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others