On Writing

"Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude--and now and then a piece of red meat."

Henry Miller

"For Christ sake and don't worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket....Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously."

Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

"There's no one out there waiting for it, and nobody's going to scold you if you don't do it."

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"It's easy, after all not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them."

Julian Barnes

"Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

Red Smith

"The most solid advice...for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."

William Saroyan