Summer Ross > Summer's Quotes

“Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.”
― Pam Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness

“The Universe has a plan to make sure we don't ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts.”
― Pam Houston

“I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.”
― Pam Houston

“Writers, it is said, all carry a chip of ice in their hearts”
― Pam Houston, Sight Hound

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette

“Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...

Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

“Editing is the very edge of your knowledge forced to grow--a test you can't cheat on.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)
A good novel editor is invisible.”
― Terri Windling