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Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. Mark

Twain

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. Clarice Lispector

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write

fiction. Virginia WoolfIve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the

professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and thats

the only way of insuring ones immortality. James Joyce

The first draft of anything is shit. Ernest Hemingway

Always be a poet, even in prose. Charles Baudelaire

Literature creative literature unconcerned with sex, is

inconceivable. Gertrude Stein

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in

writing, or sing in writing, then dont write, because our culture has

no use for it. Anas Nin

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedlythe most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric

of life. Henry Miller

Writers arent people exactly. Or, if theyre any good, theyre a

whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. F. Scott

Fitzgerald

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says

it. Alain Robbe-Grillet

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he

could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

Samuel BeckettLife is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write

new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation

to reality and dont care to know any more. Michel Houellebecq

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it

is to be a human being? Isnt it such a relief to have somebody say

that? Kurt Vonnegut

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which

condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory

presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to

make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him,

submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

Julio Cortzar

Dont bend; dont water it down; dont try to make it logical; dont

edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most

intense obsessions mercilessly. Franz Kafka

Reading is more important than writing. Roberto Bolao

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a

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beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. Ezra Pound

The next real literary rebels in this country might well emerge as

some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to

back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually

to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of

plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life withreverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip

fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they

even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed.

Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe thatll be the point.

Maybe thats why theyll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far

as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked

the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship,

accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Todays risks are

different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn,

the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted

ironists, the Oh how banal. To risk accusations of sentimentality,

melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be

suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule

above imprisonment without law. Who knows. David Foster

Wallace

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their

greatest happiness in using it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of

things. Words without experience are meaningless. Vladimir

Nabokov

Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that passthrough your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty describe

all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you

express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your

dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life

seems poor, dont blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that

you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the

creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even

if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the

worlds sounds wouldnt you still have your childhood, that jewel

beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn yourattentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous

past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand

and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the

noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of

this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems

come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are

good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works:

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for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of

your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of

necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. Rainer Maria

Rilke

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything. Walt

WhitmanAll I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes

a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end,

as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Samuel Beckett

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were

a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest

euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your

profession? Its never been anything but your religion. Never. Im a

little overexcited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you

will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you wont

be asked. You wont be asked if you were working on a wonderful,

moving piece of writing when you died. You wont be asked if it was

long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You wont be

asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it.

You wont even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would

have been working on if you had known your time would be up when

it was finishedI think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. Im so

sure youll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars

out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how

easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. J.D.

Salinger