You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” ~ Saul Bellow
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Tag: writer
Writer’s Wisdom ~ Colette on Writing
To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play around a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts, and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Writer’s Wisdom ~ Jane Hirshfield on Good Poems
Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections — language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who are, what we are. ~ Jane Hirshfield
Writer’s Wisdom ~ Zadie Smith on Creating Space to Write
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. ~ Zadie Smith
Writer’s Wisdom ~ Zadie Smith on ‘What Matters’
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page. ~ Zadie Smith
Writer’s Wisdom ~ Zadie Smith on Reading
When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Writer’s Wisdom ~ Malcolm Cowley
The germ of a story is something seen or heard, or heard about, or suddenly remembered; it may be a remark casually dropped at the dinner table (as in the case of Henry James’s story, The Spoils of Poynton), or again it may be the look on a stranger’s face. ~ Malcolm Cowley
