“There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.”
“Nothing on earth hurts my soul deeper than conditional love.”
“Writers see the world differently. Every voice we hear, every face we see, every hand we touch could become story fabric.”
“Don’t ever trust anyone who’s writing a book. They make up lies for a living.”
“Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way.”
“But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation— and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity— the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
“The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story”
“Writers are engineers of human souls.”
“That s okay, I said. We re writers. We make things up.”
“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
“The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us”
“I often said that writers are of two types. There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint. And then there s the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He s not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth. No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I m very much more a gardener.”
“Come se nel cuore della natura di uno scrittore ci fosse la purezza. Il cielo aiuti un simile scrittore! Come se Joyce non avesse annusato oscenamente le mutande di Nora. Come se nell’anima di Dostoevskij non avesse mai bisbigliato Svidrigailov. Nel cuore della natura di uno scrittore c’è il capriccio. Curiosità, fissazioni, isolamento, veleno, feticismo, austerità, leggerezza, perplessità, infantilismo eccetera. Il naso nella cucitura di un indumento intimo: ecco la natura dello scrittore. L’impurità.”
“I don t think writers need to be insane. Just crazy.”
“That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them”
“The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.”
“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. [Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech]”