Have collected these from several sources. Sometimes funny, sometimes deep, and I suppose they can apply to any of the arts and their practitioners. Will try to post one a day for the next little while. If anyone else wants to contribute - about writing or music or art or...please do. "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." - Robert Heinlein
"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." -STEPHEN KING mm
<DT class=quote>Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.<DD class=author> -Oscar Wilde </DD>
If you've never read it, Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses is a real hoot, especially if you're familiar with Cooper's works (Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, etc.). His section on Cooper's fictional Indians jumping on to a riverboat from an overhead branch alone is worth the price of admission. Anyway, here's some of Twain's rules of storytelling (which he charges--with plentiful evidence--that Cooper breaks):
Yes! I read that for my American Lit course last summer and laughed my ass off the entire time. I need to get that book back from my mother...
Writerly rivalries are a hoot. Another famous one was Faulkner vs. Hemingway: William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary." Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" And speaking of Twain: "A classic is something everybody talks about and nobody has read." And something I can relate to: "If I had more time, I would write a shorter story."
Does anyone? Except maybe this guy: Isaac Asimov: (from Asimov Laughs Again) I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters in three segments, all at once, though they were to be run on three separate days. In between two of the segments, she asked me how many books I had written, and I told her. She said, "Don't you ever want to do anything but write?" "No," I said. "Don't you want to go hunting? Fishing? Dancing? Hiking?" And I said, "No! No! No! and No!" She said, "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?" I said, "Type faster."
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. —Graham Greene
More Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway, when asked what was the most frightening thing he ever encountered, answered: “A blank sheet of paper.”
Dorothy Parker: “If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.”
My Mom: How are you going to make enough money to live? My Mom After I Paid Off Her Mortgage: I guess you're doing okay.
Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” - Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille
Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are. ---Rod Serling
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper, not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. - Jacques Barzun
Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress (on why he writes at home from 6:30 to 8:30 AM): “I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.”
Im a little more inclined to enjoy Twain's sense of humor, over his fantastic words of wisdom. .... "I didnt attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter expressing my approval of it." "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please." "I never let schooling interfere with my education." "Be weary of reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
Georgia O’Keeffe: “One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going. "You get the garden planted, the roof fixed. You take the dog to the vet. You spend the day with a friend. You learn to make a new kind of bread. You hunt up photographs for someone who thinks he needs them. You certainly have to do the shopping. You may even enjoy doing such things. You think they have to be done. You even think that you have to have some visitors or take a trip to keep from getting queer living alone with just two chows. "But all day you wait for the time you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot - in a way it is what you do the other things for...The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons, all the other things that make one’s life.”
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others. - William Faulkner
Not a writer, but an excerpt from a Letter to the Editor of some photography magazine in the 1930s or -40s: Weston was a contemporary and friend of Ansel Adams.
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. — Baltasar Gracián, 17th century scholar and philosopher
^Don't we all? I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know. - Mel Brooks
