Toni Morrison — Good, but never simple
I tell my students to liberate a certain part of their mind that, because they are good, humble people they may have likely suppressed, and that's the part that wants to be known, that wants to be famous or rich or whatever. I say that part is not entirely separate from the part of you that wants to be a great writer. Which is not separate from the... See more
Jane Ratcliffe • Craft Advice from George Saunders
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Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
William Zinsser • 1 highlight
amazon.com
Learning to write comes from reading, both the work of published writers and of our peers, and from using one’s powers of insight and creativity to analyze what one reads and figure out why it works when it does and what is missing when it doesn’t. This is where knowledge is gained, and it’s slow and frustrating, nebulous, diffuse, much less direct
... See moreJo Ann Beard • Festival Days
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Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. B
... See moreThe American Scholar • Solitude and Leadership
For Flannery O’Connor, ‘the teacher’s work should be largely negative . . . We can learn how not to write.’ But it would be terrible to discourage novice writers by pointing out their failings in public.
Miranda France • The Writing School
Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here’s the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?) How would we know? Well, as we’ve said, the only method by which we can know is to read what we’ve written on the assump
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