Writings Quotes (page 230)
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Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
David Foster Wallace
We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans — because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin… but who we are internally… perhaps even spiritually. There’s something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we...
Maya Angelou
At the apex of Prince's career, I listened almost exclusively to metal. My sister actually purchased 'Purple Rain' on cassette, which I write about in my anthology ["Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas"]. And I felt ashamed that I liked Prince so much. A typical rock fan would be embarrassed that they liked Warrant or Ratt at the time, but I had the exact opposite experience. And I had this overwhelming fear that Prince was actually a better guitar player than...
Chuck Klosterman
Story ideas had never been a problem for him, there'd always been more ideas than time to write them, he'd reject one perfectly good notion because he fell more simpatico toward a different one. But of course he could never go back to any of those ancient story stubs, they wouldn't still have juice in them. For him, creating a novel was like gardening; you choose your seed, you treat it exactly the way the package says, and gradually a thing of beauty - or of sturdiness, or of nutrition -...
Donald E. Westlake
Best putdown of a copy editor ever award goes to Raymond Chandler, who, in a 1947 letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote: "By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax...
Raymond Chandler
I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.
Sylvia Plath
I was such a foolish girl - girls are foolish, Mr. Satterthwaite. They are so sure of themselves, so convinced they know best. People write and talk a lot of a ‘woman’s instinct.’ I don’t believe, Mr. Satterthwaite, that there is any such thing. There doesn’t seem to be anything that warns girls against a certain type of man. Nothing in themselves, I mean. Their parents warn them, but that’s no good - one doesn’t believe. It seems dreadful to say so, but there is something attractive to a...
Agatha Christie
In other words, after Winthrop has acquired all his butter firkins, food stirrers, and beer along with six dozen candles, twenty thousand biscuits, and twenty-nine sides of beef, he goes through the Bible and writes down a bunch of verses commanding him to be willing to cheerfully give all that stuff away. My firkin is your firkin being one of Christianity's primary creeds.
Sarah Vowell
Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me,...
Jeanette Winterson