Writers

A writer's like anybody else except when he's writing. –Shelby Foote

Accepting the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia, I have employed the novelist’s methods without his license. –Shelby Foote, The Civil War

Shelby Foote once criticized scholars for saying, “Here’s a subject I’m interested in—as soon as I’ve discovered everything there is to know about it, I’ll write a book.” Foote’s own approach was “I think I’ll write a book about it and see what I can learn.” --John Egerton

… Foote shared with him his Aristotelian belief that a narrative pattern already exists within an event, one that merely needed to be discovered. Foote encapsulated his beliefs … by saying, “God is the greatest dramatist.” --C. Stuart Chapman

He [Phillip Roth] now lives the life he’s always wanted to live without the beholdeness to others except the people he cares about. He’s like a graduate student/monk. There are not a lot of moving parts to his life now. Complicated domestic arrangements, the needs and conflicts of family life, are all Rube Goldberg machines, and he now does without that. When you are younger, you’re propelled by a lot of unslaked desires. Now there is this one thing: the work. –Judith Thurman

For a long time, Roth kept two small signs near his desk. One read, “Stay Put,” the other, “No Optional Striving.” Optional striving appears to be a category that includes everything save writing, exercise, sleep, and solitude. –David Remnick

It’s a wonderful experience. That act of passionate and minute memory is what binds your days together—days, weeks, months—and living with it is my greatest pleasure. I think for any novelist it has to be the greatest pleasure, that’s why you’re doing it—to make the daily connections. I do it by living a very austere life. I don’t experience it as being austere in any negative sense, but you have to be a bit like a soldier with a barracks life, or whatever you want to call it. That is to say, I rule everything else out of my life. I didn’t always, but I do now. … If I’m healthy and strong and writing every day, who cares? Whatever problem is raised for me by what I’m writing, I think, Don’t worry about it, all it takes is time. That’s all it takes. I don’t worry anymore that I don’t have what it takes to solve the problem. There are no interruptions, and I’ve got all the time in the world. Time is on my side. –Phillip Roth

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends. –Phillip Roth

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. –Phillip Roth

For the writer, home is that place from which we can observe, where distractions are at a minimum.

Someone once said to W. H. Auden, “I didn’t like your last book.” Said Auden, “I didn’t write it for you.”

(writers engage despair by writing about it) [I]n calamity, he finds new materials. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one pisses from quite the height that Vidal does. In his detachment, he is too clear-eyed to hate and too knowing to be grave. His goal, it seems to me, is to teach, which is why he so often writes in epigrams. He doesn’t want to be remembered; he wants to be memorized. –John Updike

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves. –John Updike

The great paradox of the writer’s life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people. –Betsy Lerner

It contains little in the way of original primary research: FitzGerald hasn’t done much legwork. But she has done heroic chairwork. She has read and digested prodigious quantities of material …. By drawing together thousands of snapshots and arranging them side by side along a timeline, she achieves a stereoptic effect. This isn’t just a picture of the Reagan Administration’s arms-control machinations—it’s a hologram.

You did not come back from hell with empty hands. –Andre Malraux to Whittaker Chambers after reading the galleys of Witness

He [August Wilson] has tried to live his writing life by the Buddhist motto “You’re entitled to the work but not the reward.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay said that she treated suitors for her hand as she later, laughingly, claimed to treat her publishers: “Although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.”

In my own experience, nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. To most people, even those who don’t read much, there is something special and vaguely magical about writing, and it is not easy for them to believe that someone they know—someone quite ordinary in many respects—can really do it. –John Gardner

Muse is a ghost. In a real sense, writing comes as it comes. It really is like ghostwriting. It’s like it comes form someplace else. Maxwell Perkins, I think, said that Thomas Wolfe wasn’t a writer, he was a divine wind chime. The wind blew through him and he just rattled. And I think that’s true of a lot of writers. It’s true of me. –Stephen King

(Geoffrey Wolff’s first novel) Wolff never tried to sell the novel. His advisor at Princeton “took care of that for me,” he says. “Actually, he advised me to put it in my desk drawer. And I said, ‘Save it?’ He said, ‘No, I’d lock the desk drawer, throw away the key.’ Keys can be found. He said, ‘I’d set fire to the desk.’”

Vonnegut doesn’t really have a best and worst. He once wrote about the radio comedians Bob and Ray that their worst was pretty close to their best, and the same is true of him.

One of the reasons I could never write about what our family life was really like was because my parents were good, hard-working, responsible people and that's boring for a novelist. What I discovered inadvertently was that if you put pressure on these decent people, then you've got a story. –Phillip Roth

(a reply to critics) I’m a writer. I MAKE THINGS UP. –Gore Vidal

Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have omitted to mention that he could not write. –Rebecca West

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. –Flannery O’Connor

I did not know how long I would live, and I longed to leave something absolutely truthful; this play might well illuminate the dilemma of science, but it failed to embarrass me with what it revealed, and I had never written a good thing that did not make me blush (nor did I think anyone else had either). –Arthur Miller

The good thing about being a writer is that if you are a real writer, no one is going to write the same book as you. They might get some things right that you got wrong, but it won’t be the same book. –Robert Hughes

He [John Updike] must have had an unpublished thought, but you couldn’t tell it. –William Pritchard

A writer is always selling somebody out. –Joan Didion

He slipped occasionally, for he fought on muddy grounds. –Ben Hecht, said of Westbrook Pegler

During the Great Depression, Frederick Faust (Max Brand) was one of the best-paid pulp fiction writers in America, earning five cents a word. He managed to make about 100,000 dollars a year at that rate, finishing a full-length novel every week. But what he really always wanted to be was a poet, and he was ashamed of the novels he published. In a letter to his wife, he said, "Daily I thank God in three languages that I write under a pen name." When his children asked him what he did with his typewriter all day, he told them he was making shoes. –Garrison Keillor

Solitary ... people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers. –Elizabeth Bowen, writing to V. S. Pritchett

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. [If you become a writer] you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it. –Tobias Wolff

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

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better. –A. J. Liebling

Not enough love in the home, the verdict is, and so poor little Truman [Capote] sought it everywhere else. ("Too much love in the home," I long to write on papers by many undeservedly confident students.) --Joseph Epstein

My rooms [full of books] might have been armor, a disguise or a beard, but I wanted millions of admirers to peek inside and see me there, and when they did I wished for them to revere and pity me at once. The contradiction in this wish tormented me, so I ignored it. Then I became a writer and it began to sustain me. –Jonathan Lethem

A person becomes a writer because they're deficient. They have problems. They're crazy. They have unhappy families. They're eccentric. And not because they've read a lot of books necessarily, but on the contrary - maybe they haven't read enough books. There's a strong irrationality about the writing life. Often a writer writes just to maintain their sanity. –Paul Theroux

My early novels were acquired by the National Library of Oblivion, they were happy and at peace now, I was free to do whatever I wanted. –Alan Furst

Back in the United States, I went where all historical novelists must go, to the library. My favorite place. I have a theory that writers don’t actually want to write books, they want to read them, but, discovering that they are unavailable to read, because they are unwritten, they write them. –Alan Furst

“My primary aim is to amuse Americans on their aircraft. … You have your life and your work, and you should get the two as confused and as mixed up as possible. Make it all one fabric. Vincent van Gogh did that. Hank Williams did it, Allen Ginsberg, Bukowski, those kinds of people did it.” He thought about it for a minute, lit his cigar, and added, “Anne Frank, of necessity, did it.” Kinky Friedman, quoted by Dan Halpern

Perfection of the life or of the work. –W. B. Yeats

(Paul Johnson writes about 6,000 words a day, every day, but he says:) That's
nothing to a chap like Sartre! Sartre could do 20,000 words a day! That's why in my essay on him I call him a little ball of fur and ink!

[I had] the kind of happy childhood that is so damaging to a writer...where our fathers were all World War II veterans and our mothers were always at home. –Thomas Mallon

I've never thought about myself in terms of a career... I don't have a career, I have a typewriter. --Don DeLillo

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life. -- José Saramago

I am in fact, a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands. I smoke a pipe and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field).... I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much. –J. R. R. Tolkien

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three of four hundred acres to my magnificent
estate. –Jack London

No human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate. –Christoper Hampton

[Samuel Beckett] His argument was with the Book of Genesis. –Hugh Kenner

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October. –John Leonard

All my writing is about noncommunication--which is very sad and very funny. --William Trevor

E. B. White avoided public gatherings and ceremonies whenever he could. At White’s memorial service, Roger Angell, his stepson, said, “If Andy White could be with us today he would not be with us today.”

All I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world. –E. B. White

Thomas Coraghessan Boyle was born Thomas John Boyle, but he changed his middle name to Coraghessan when he was 17. He said, "I suppose it's an affectation, of a sort, but what the hell. There are five billion of us on the planet all screaming for attention."

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. –Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted. –G. K. Chesterton

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose. --Hortense Calisher

[Jack] London, sober, would have written nothing worth reading. –H. L. Mencken