Quotes About Writing

every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self.

I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.

every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I'd make a brooch out of it.

Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another.

Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you're not yet sure of voice or anything else, you're free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You're free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader's head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book. You

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.

As with everything I've ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure. The tarantula ego—starving to be shored up by praise—tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small, true thing is standing in line for me to say.

Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don't sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own "you-ness"—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which

A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.

You can do "research," i.e. postponing writing, till Jesus dons a nightie. But your memoir's real enemy is blinking back at you from the shaving glass when you floss at night—your ignorant ego and its myriad masks.

Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every

In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you're the baby. In memoir, you're the mommy, and the reader's the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. ("No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain

It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me—my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer—if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I've done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery.

What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don't do it, dog.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)

Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.

I'll go on writing till the end of my days. I have been writing too long to stop.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be gone. [ Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver ( O Magazine , March 2011)]