“Your complete literary man writes all the time. It wakes him in the morning to write, it exercises him to write, it rests him to write. Writing is to him a visit from a friend, a cup of tea, a game of cards, a walk in the country, a warm bath, an after-dinner nap, a hot Scotch before bed, and the sleep that follows it. Your complete literary chap is a writing animal; and when he dies he leaves a cocoon as large as a haystack, in which every breath he has drawn is recorded in writing.”

John Jay Chapman

more info

“Failure is a big source of innovation in music.”

Brian Eno

more info

“Kids don’t plan to play. They don’t go: ‘Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It’s gonna be a three-act.’”

Lynda Barry

more info

“The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning ‘to shape, fashion, form, or mold.’ Any verbal account is a fashioning and shaping of events.”

David Shields

more info

“Were all these writers and artists more fragile than ordinary human beings or do we just know their names? It does seem as if there is a peril association with gift, a proclivity to break your brain just as professional skiers may be apt to break their legs as they swoop downward through wind and snow. It may be that to see and tell the story of human error is to dare to expose yourself to the sacred flash of truth that can drive you mad. Or are you mad to try in the first place?”

Anne Roiphe

more info

“What a discovery I made one day that the more I spent the more I grew, that it was as easy to occupy a large place & do much work as an obscure place & do little…”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

more info

“Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up.”

William S. Burroughs

more info

“Didn’t somebody ask Leonard Cohen where he got his ideas, and he said that if he knew, he’d go there more often? What I’m trying to do is find a way to get into that place. And I can do it on my own, but it’s been really interesting being around other people, trying to show them about it, because it really is just showing somebody where the path is down to the curvy river. And people think I’m a genie at first, and then they realize, no, I just knew where the trailhead was.”

Lynda Barry

more info

“Now that I’m here, my greatest urge is to speak to you of dental care. My generation had a rough go dentally. Our dentists were the army dentists who came back from World War Two and believed that the dental office was a battle ground. You have a better chance at dental health. And I say this because you want at night to be pacing the floor because your fuse is burning inside of you, because you want to do your work, because you want to finish that canvas, because you want to make that design, because you want to help your fellow man. You don’t want to be pacing because you need a damn root canal. So, floss. You know, use salt and baking soda. Get them professionally cleaned if you can afford it. Take care of your damn teeth.”

Patti Smith

more info

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Henry James

more info

“I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”

William Faulkner

more info

“It is sometimes necessary to be silent for months before the central image of a book can occur. I do not write every day, I read every day, think every day, work in the garden every day, and recognize in nature the same slow complicity. The same inevitability. The moment will arrive, always it does, it can be predicted but it cannot be demanded. I do not think of this as inspiration. I think of it as readiness. A writer lives in a constant state of readiness. For me, the fragments of the image I seek are stellar; they beguile me, as stars do, I seek to describe them, to interpret them, but I cannot possess them, they are too far away.”

Jeanette Winterson

more info

“If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other human endeavor. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired.”

Jeanette Winterson

more info

“Any minute now I will make a knife out of a cloud.”

W. S. Merwin

more info

“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.”

Joan Didion

more info