Tim Porter > Tim's Quotes

“Not, I hasten to say, that writing is ever all that hard. Beware of writers who tell you how hard they work. (Beware of anyone who tries to tell you that.) Writing is indeed often dark and lonely, but no one really has to do it.

Yes, writing can be complicated, exhausting, isolating, abstracting, boring, dulling, briefly exhilarating; it can be made to be grueling and demoralizing. And occasionally it can produce rewards. But it’s never as hard as, say, piloting an L-1011 into O’Hare on a snowy night in January, or doing brain surgery when you have to stand up for ten hours straight, and once you start you just can’t stop. If you’re a writer, you can stop anywhere, any time, and no one will care or every know. Plus, the results might be better.

-- Richard Ford, Writers on Writing”
― Richard Ford, Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times

“In what ways, if any, does talent set you apart? Does it exempt you from the duties and responsibilities expected of others? Or does it load you up with even more duties and responsibilities, but of a different kind?”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“Is your cheese this good?

This wasn’t plain old housing projects “cheese food”; nor was it some smelly, curdled, reluctant Swiss cheese material snatched from a godforsaken bodega someplace, gathering mold in some dirty display case while mice gnawed at it nightly, to be sold, to some sucker fresh from Santo Domingo. This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to bet the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world ...”
― James McBride, Deacon King Kong

“... I found I could not read just any book. It had gotten so I could see through books – the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character. I needed the writing to have a certain mineral density. It had to feel naturally meant, but not cynically contrived. I grew to dislike manipulations.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence