wisdom

W. D. Snodgrass

There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

from the poem "April Inventory" (1957)

life

Adrienne Rich

A life I didn't choose
chose me...

from "The Roofwalker" (1961)

sur la vie

Charles Baudelaire

"Nous avons fortement vécu, et nous cherchons ce que nous pourrions aimer et estimer."


from his poem "Portraits de Maîtresses" in "Le Spleen de Paris" (1869)

why write?

Ernest Hemingway

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

on capitalism

William Gaddis

...what we’re talking about is not [capitalism] itself, but its abuses, I don’t mean criminal but the abundant abuses just within the letter of the law. The essential question is whether it can survive these abuses given free rein and whether these abuses are inherent in the system itself. ... our best hope lies in bringing things under better and more equitable control, cutting back the temptations to unmitigated greed and bemused dishonesty...

gimme a break

Todd Wolfe

I can't quit you babe but I got to put you down for a while.

from the song "I Can't Quit You Baby"

the flapping mind

Gary Snyder

The only thing that is keeping the emotion alive is your own thoughts... You keep churning it over and over again. Your thoughts do not care about you. They only want to perpetuate themselves.

you choose

Jim Capaldi and Steve Winwood

If I gave you everything that I owned and asked for nothing in return,
would you do the same for me as I would for you?
Or take me for a ride, take everything including my pride -
But spirit is something that no one destroys

from the song "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" by Traffic

on writing

William Trevor

I think self-confidence is a very dangerous thing for writers. I tend to write in a fragile, edgy, doubtful sort of way, trying things out all the time, never confident that I’ve got something right.

what a writer needs

Hunter S. Thompson

I would say it hurts when you're right and it hurts when you're wrong, but it hurts a lot less when you're right. You have to be right in your judgments. That's probably the equivalent of what Hemingway said about having a shock-proof shit detector.

please care

George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan

I've been fobbed off, and I've been fooled
I've been robbed and ridiculed
In day care centers and night schools
Handle me with care

Been stuck in airports, terrorized
Sent to meetings, hypnotized
Overexposed, commercialized
Handle me with care
...
I've been uptight and made a mess
But I'll clean it up myself, I guess

from "Handle Me With Care" by the Traveling Wilburys

on writing

V. S. Naipaul

You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life. I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world. You have to contain this in your writing.

the truth in fiction

Maya Angelou

I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

on writing

Truman Capote

The writer's individual humanity, his word or gesture toward the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader. If the personality is vague or confused or merely literary, ça ne va pas.

on writing

Archibald MacLeish

You don’t write as a writer, you write as a man—a man with a certain hard-earned skill in the use of words, a particular, and particularly naked, consciousness of human life, of the human tragedy and triumph—a man who is moved by human life, who cannot take it for granted.

leadership

George Washington

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.





-- Inscription on the Washington Square arch in New York City, shown in a 1980s photo looking south to the World Trade Center's twin towers visible here beneath the arch.

on writing prose

Jack Kerouac

...in poetry you can be completely free to say anything you want, you don't have to tell a story, you can use secret puns, that's why I always say, when writing prose, “No time for poetry now, get your plain tale.”

carpe diem

Eihei Dogen

If this one day in the lifetime of a hundred years is lost, will you ever get your hands on it again?

what it takes to be a writer

William Styron

...first would be a background in reading. A writer must have read an enormous amount by the time he begins to write...

The second thing is that you must love language. You must adore language—cherish it, and play with it and love what it does. You have to have a vocabulary...

Those are two of the most important things for a writer. The rest is passion and vision...

naked lunch

William Burroughs

The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

speaking about his 1959 novel