IT’S A LONELY BUSINESS, being a writer. Little wonder we’re hungry for words of advice and encouragement. I’ve collected those words for more than thirty years, writing many of them in longhand on the inside covers of my journals and adding others to digital files. I go to them sometimes when I need a chuckle or a kick in the butt. Sometimes they help. If they don’t, at least they’re elevating diversions.

Last month I sent out a newsletter announcing the release of Glenn Wolff’s and my new letterpress broadside, “Summer Night, Lake Michigan”. I also included some of my favorite literary excerpts and passages. The response was overwhelming: “We want more!” So I’ve decided to make “Writers on Writing” a regular feature on this blog and in future newsletters. (If you’d like to be added to the list, sign up at the bottom of this page.)

Here’s the first batch, ready to be pinned to walls and refrigerators:

 

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

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“Words bounce.” —Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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“I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.”—Gertrude Stein (quoted in Carson’s book)

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“There is a time for reciting poems, and a time for fists.”—Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives

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“The poet must not avert his eyes.”—Werner Herzog

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“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”—Franz Kafka

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“Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth—even an atom of it.”—Saul Bellow, Herzog

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“Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for.” —Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up

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“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity; those who would like to seem profound…strive for obscurity.” —Nietzsche

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“I’m tired of the poets of the day who muddy their waters that they might seem deep.”—Nietzsche

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“What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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“Why is it that poetry always seems to me so much more a true work of the soul than prose?…Perhaps it is that prose is earned and poetry given.” —May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

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“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” —Ezra Pound

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“Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.” —Malcolm Cowly

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And from the August newsletter:

“It is possible at last for Masa and me to imagine a little of what the ancient —archaic — mind and life of Japan were. And to see what could be restored to the life today. A lot of it is simply in being aware of clouds and wind.” —Gary Snyder, final lines of Earth House Hold

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“…one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.” —Virginia Woolf on the essays of Charles Lamb in A Room of One’s Own

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“‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.” —Robert Hass, quoted in “A Few Questions for Poetry,” by Daniel Halpern, in the New York Times

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“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” ― Vita Sackville-West

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“As a writer, my principal observation about why other writers fail is that they are in too much of a hurry. I don’t think you can write a good book in two years. You may disagree, you have done that, but you’re an anomaly. Most of us can’t write books that quickly, and we need to be a little bit more tortoise-y and a little less hare-ish.

“The problem is that the world wants you to be a hare. Your publisher says I want it now, you’re under pressure, you have a one-year sabbatical where you try to cram and finish, you’ve got a teaching load, etc.

“But one thing that almost all of the professional writers I know do is write drafts and then put the book in a drawer for six months. Then they come back to it, turn themselves into tortoises, force themselves to slow down. That, in a sense, harms the system in that the amount of output is lowered. But I don’t think the problem with writing in America right now is a failure of output. I think it’s a failure of quality.” —Malcolm Gladwell, interview in heleo.com: 

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And finally, because fall is just around the corner: