Why Write? Quotes

“Prophets are not honored in their own land or in their own time either. The future bears them out—or it does not.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters

“Writing is hard. It’s tough to get up in the morning and look at the white snowfield of a trackless page. How to push forward? Use anger; use rage if you have to. Settle scores. And if you have no scores to settle, then create a few for yourself, not only for the purposes of public relations, but also for the purposes of inspiration. Hot-blooded, hot-tempered, always ready to take offense: the writer as duelist.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters

“sense is made not by coercing the facts or pumping up the rhetorical volume. Sense is made by sifting through the sand of our ignorance to find, here and there, the words and thoughts that persuade ourselves (truly) and perhaps consequently to persuade others.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters

“Browning calls the poet God’s spy and that’s a complimentary way of putting it. We could say, more neutrally, that writers are almost always spies and have the kinds of lives that spying creates. They are constantly collecting information, making mental notes.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters

“They live in a culture that measures success by the number of copies sold not the number of spirits touched. They have to shorten their sentences and compress their sentiments to the common bandwidth.”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters

“Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of one’s language were the limits of one’s world. By coming up with fresh and arresting words to describe the world accurately, the writer expands the boundaries of her world, and possibly her readers’ world, too. Real writing can do what R. P. Blackmur said it could: add to the stock of available reality. There”
― Mark Edmundson, Why Write?: A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters