“My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I’d never have written a line.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
Tag: literary quote
Quote of the Day, J.D. Salinger
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Quote of the Day, David Foster Wallace
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.
—David Foster Wallace,
“An Interview with Larry McCaffery,”
The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
Summer 1993
Quote of the Day, Elmore Leonard
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
—Elmore Leonard, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,”
New York Times, July 16, 2001
Quote of the Day, Jack Kerouac
… 20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better …
—Jack Kerouac, “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,”
Evergreen Review, Spring 1959
Quote of the Day, Jim Thompson
There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.
—Jim Thompson, as quoted in Robert Polito’s Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson
Quote of the Day, Henry Miller
I knew I wouldn’t ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.
—Henry Miller, Reflections
Quote of the Day, F.O. Matthiessen
…We must remember that Santayana coined the phrase ‘the genteel tradition’ to describe what he considered the most dangerous defect in American thought.
Observing our dominant New England culture, Santayana believed that its deep-rooted error was that it separated thought from experience. Among the legacies of a colonial culture is the habit of thinking of creative sources as somehow remote from itself, of escaping from the hardness and rawness of everyday surroundings into an idealized picture of civilized refinement, of believing that the essence of beauty must lie in what James Russell Lowell read about in Keats rather than in what Walt Whitman saw in the streets of Brooklyn. The inescapable result of this is to make art an adornment rather than an organic expression of life, to confuse it with politeness and delicacy.
— F.O. Matthiessen, Theodore Dreiser
Quote of the Day, Dave Newman
… what all writers realize: writing is as hard as making clouds and the sky is already filled.
— Dave Newman,
Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children
Quote of the Day, Mickey Spillane
The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.
— Mickey Spillane