“The writer is always a careful observer, but if you are constantly evacuating your imagination, your eyes and ears grow even sharper, and you lean forward with hunger for every experience, knowing that it will offer up a card to add to your hand. This is, after all, a gambler's trade. All in. Always…”— Benjamin Percy, glimmertrain.com
“Revisiting old work and wanting immediately to baptize it with fire is perfectly natural, perfectly healthy... but beyond merely accepting our old badness and taking solace in how far we've come, we ought sometimes to run back into the flames and drag re-writable ideas from the rubble.”— Trevor Crown, glimmertrain.com
“What inspires me in these moments is knowing that I am part of a fellowship of admirable, stubborn people who face the same challenges I do. Oftentimes, this is fuel enough for me to invest the time and care it takes to write a paragraph or two that might grow into a meaningful story.”— Taiyaba Husain, glimmertrain.com
“But, of course, it's not the excuses we have to worry about. It's the responsibilities we bear, the economy we live in, the society that increasingly devalues art and pushes writers beyond its fringes. These very real concerns take up hours in our days and real estate in our psyches. And to dismiss…”— Taiyaba Husain, glimmertrain.com
“as a writer, if someone falls in love with my work, i know they have fallen in love with my mind. having no idea what my face looks like, they chose my mind. art may be the only space a woman can be whole without being seen.”— Nayyirah Waheed, nayyirahwaheed.tumblr.com
“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it o…”— Annie Dillard, amazon.com
“We don't just read sentences, we also make meaning out of how they move.”— Juliet Patterson, iowasummerwritingfestival.org
“Knowing what you're trying to say is always important, but knowing what you've said is crucial.”— Juliet Patterson, iowasummerwritingfestival.org
“The truth is that a layman will never take an author quite seriously. He regards authorship not as a profession, but as something between an inspiration and a hobby.”— A. A. Milne, narrativemagazine.com
“But with a notebook in the pocket you are safe; no thought is too fleeting to escape you.”— A. A. Milne, narrativemagazine.com
“It’s important to learn how to balance the writer’s mind (free-flowing, wild, possibly insane) and the editor’s mind (careful, craftsmanlike, obsessive about detail), and in fact you need both.”— Cary Groner, glimmertrain.com
“Language creates boundaries around chaos and gives meaning to pain, to mess, and to confusion. Sentences emerge from the internal wilderness and form a path. And yet words can form a barrier between emotion and experience. Any writer will tell you how baffling is the gap between imagination and exec…”— Irene Keliher, narrativemagazine.com
“My work as a sculptor has trained me to write in the same way. When I start a piece I work it from all directions. I jump back and forth from section to section in no particular order. I leave broad ideas and impressions everywhere. I make notations and draw charts. I don’t write in complete sentenc…”— Annie Weatherwax, blog.pshares.org
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”— Joan Didion, amazon.com