Stanislaw Lem

 "The question of genres is simply unimportant for me, and very often I turn to different modes of writing. I want to write about things that interest me and in ways that interest me. One could simply say that I attempt certain mental experiments and try to create certain situational models." 

Frank Loesser

 

"I don’t write slowly, it’s just that I throw out fast."

                     –Frank Loesser

Susanna Clarke

"C. S. Lewis said that all of the Narnia books began with the image of a faun in a snowy wood, carrying parcels. Or I might start with a character about which I know very little, just one or two things (for instance that, as a child, he got lost in some Roman ruins). The important thing is that the idea, whatever it is, has roots, that it goes deep down into the imagination, into the unconscious. Because if it has roots, then it will, with a bit of watering and careful pruning, grow into something quite interesting."

–Susanna Clarke

Raymond Chandler

 

"The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."

                                                           –Raymond Chandler

Sidney Lumet

"Except in two cases, every writer I've worked with has wanted to work with me again. I think one of the reasons is that I love dialogue. Dialogue is not uncinematic. So many of the movies of the thirties and forties that we adore are constant streams of dialogue.

Of course we remember Jimmy Cagney squashing a grapefruit into Mae Clark's face. But does that evoke more affectionate memory than "Here's looking at you, kid"?

          –Sidney Lumet

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To Librarians, with Love

It's National Library Week. This seems like an apt tribute.

 

Agatha Christie

 

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”

                                     ― Agatha Christie

Calvin Trillin

 

“A new regulation for the publishing industry: 

The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.”

           -- Calvin Trillin

Roger Angell

 “Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.”

― Roger Angell

Stephen Dobyns

 

“Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.”

― Stephen Dobyns

Dr. Seuss

 

My great-great-nephew Atticus's first book was, of course, an autographed copy of my own novel. I would not be surprised if his taste leans toward Dr. Seuss at this point. He is, after all, barely five days old. But can you ever be too young for Sherlock Holmes?

Dylan Thomas

 

"Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work." 

                       --Dylan Thomas

Richard Brautigan

 

“I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom.”

― Richard Brautigan, Sombrero Fallout

Robert Graves

The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers 

 Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, 

Keep probability – some say – in view. 

But my advice to story-tellers is: 

Weigh out no gross of probabilities, 

Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of 

Known instances of virtue, crime or love. 

To forge a picture that will pass for true, 

Do conscientiously what liars do – 

Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid 

The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade: 

Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps 

That may shake down into a world perhaps; 

People this world, by chance created so, 

With random persons whom you do not know – 

The teashop sort, or travellers in a train 

Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again; 

Let the erratic course they steer surprise 

Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes; 

Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) 

Motive and end and moral in the air; 

Nice contradiction between fact and fact 

Will make the whole read human and exact. 

 

                                      —Robert Graves

Sondheim

 
Happy 85th birthday, Stephen Sondheim!

"The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service."

Eudora Welty

 “Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

                –Eudora Welty

"The Crudest Ideas"

 "Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will. For two hours the strange business in which we had been involved appeared to be forgotten, and he was entirely absorbed in the pictures of the modern Belgian masters. He would talk of nothing but art, of which he had the crudest ideas, from our leaving the gallery until we found ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel."

                                            -- The Hound of the Baskervilles

Jan Verhas  (9 January 1834 – 31 October 1896) was a Belgian painter of the Realist school. He wasknown for his portraits and genre paintings often depicting children of the Belgian bourgeoisie.

Arthur Phillips

 

"Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?"-- Arthur Phillips

Ridicule

 

John Crowley

   
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I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover. 

                                    

–John Crowley