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These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”
“I write when the spirit moves me,” Faulkner said, “and the spirit moves me every day.”
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) The eighteenth-century preacher and theologian—a key figure in the Great Awakening and the author of the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—spent thirteen hours a day in his study, beginning at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. (He noted in his diary, “I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by his rising from the grave very early.”)
“One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live,” he said. “I give my criticism.”
“I don’t have a compulsion to write, and I never have. I have a wish, an ambition to write, but it’s not one that justifies the word ‘drive.’
Joseph Heller
(“I don’t approve of people who watch television,” he said, “but I am one of them.”)
Glenn Gould
“Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare,” Roth said in 1987. Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare.…
Philip Roth
I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.
Philip Roth
Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) Literary legend has it that Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day’s work; this foretaste of the grave was supposed to inspire her macabre fiction and poetry. The tale is probably false.
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) The German poet, historian, philosopher, and playwright kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his workroom; he said that he needed their decaying smell in order to feel the urge to write.
What
Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods,
George Sand
My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.”
Georgia O'Keeffe
if things did not go too well, if he felt uncertain of his ideas and unhappy with his drawings, then Corbu became jittery. He would fumble with his wristwatch—a small, oddly feminine contraption, far too small for his big paw—and finally say, grudgingly, “C’est difficile, l’architecture,” toss the pencil or charcoal stub on the drawing, and slink out, as if ashamed to abandon the project and me—and us—in a predicament.
Le Corbusier
“A mathematician,” he liked to say, “is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
Paul Erdos
and I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.
John Updike
“It will appear like a calm existence,” Kalman said. “The turmoil is invisible.”
Maira Kalman
There’s no one way—there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
Bernard Malamud
