Helen Dunmore: Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".
Geoff Dyer: Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.
Anne Enright: If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
Richard Ford: Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.
Jonathan Franzen: It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Esther Freud: Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained.
PD James: Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
AL Kennedy: Have humility. Older/more experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.
Michael Moorcock: I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.
Hilary Mantel: First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?
6 comments:
Good quotes!!
How many books did you read to get all these quotes? Or are you looking up quotations? These are all great.
Loved the 'shuffling your feet' one!
this: Jonathan Franzen: It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
not just fiction, it applies to theses, too. :-) I've tried turning off my router before I got to bed, I've tried rules and schedules and quotas (I can't use the Internet until I've written two pages), etc. Sometimes it works. But most of the time the Internet just keeps me from getting things done.
GREAT list of quotes (all three days).
We could arrange for the "house internet" to close down between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am... hmmm? :-)
@Judie - Glad yousa like!
@Skye - I think I got them from the lists on Guardian.uk -- they have a whole bunch.
@widdershins - I love the feet shuffling too. I imagine myself doing a little shuffle tap dance next to my computer.
@Barb - I know, I had that problem when I was in school too. Well have that problem all the time. I read one trick where you set up a timer for intervals like 15 mins, 5 mins. For 15 you work, when the timer goes off you sluff around for 5 mins, then back to working and so on. I tried it a couple times and it was good, once I played around with the times. But in the end... procrastination SO often wins the day.
@ladada - Then I couldn't watch my teevee!
Post a Comment