Quotes on Writing

From issue #1:

• Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde senescit: Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds. (Juvenal, CE 60-130)
• Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you. (source unknown to me)
• Really mean every word you write. (source unkown to me)
• Why do English Literature specialists try to analyze every written work? I wish they could just accept the fact that imagination doesn't have a meaning. (source unkown to me)
• The obligation of the artist is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly. (Anton Chekhov)
• A writer is someone who has written today. (source unknown to me)
• The act of writing is the act of discovering why you believe. (David Hare)
• If you want to be a writer, then write. Write every day! (Samuel Johnson)
• Do you know what a writer is, first and foremost? Before even storyteller, a writer is a thinker. (Elizabeth Sweeny)

• i'm giving up/on language/my next book will be blank/pages of various textures and hues (Nikki Giovanni, from her poem "Straight Talk)
• The poet speaks to all men of their lives they have smothered and forgotten. (Edith Sitwell)
• We have to tell the American public that they're missing the boat, that they have to get into writing and reading. Not only that, but books won't crash in the year 2000. (former U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder, president of the American Publishers Association)
• In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on being named San Francisco's first poet laureate)
• I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just like jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful just to escpae. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It's pretty old-fashioned, but it's fun. (author Barry Hannah)

• In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.... It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. (S. I. Hayakwa)
• All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the chosen possession of man. (Thomas Carlyle)
• I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. (Steve Martin)
• It's much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears. (Fran Lebowitz)
• When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain. (Wallace Stegner)
• Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading. (Ruth Rendell)

i like to think that i am helping the artists & activists who cross my path disseminate their information to others. that's why i reprint lotsa stuff - to turn others on to a writer, a band, a concept. my zines is also a product of the zines in my past. (Angela in Red Under #5)
• Taking away the words will never take away the feelings, prejudice, and animosity that exists. To me, it would be better to let all gay bashers use the word "fag" as often and as loudly as possible. so the rest of us would know who to keep an eye on. It's much worse when the hatred is covert, or only expressed at militia meetings in a cabin in Michigan. When it's closed off, it festers and spreads. When it's forced out into the open, normal people can confront it, see it for what it is, and act appropriately. (Jøsh Saitz of Negative Capability in To Curse or Not to Curse: The Great Profanity Debate)
• The Sylvia Plath story is told to girls who write. They want us to think that to be a girl poet means you have to die. Who is that told me all girls who write must suicide? I've another good one for you - we are turning cursive letters into knives. (Bikini Kill, "Bloody Ice Cream")
• "Writing," he says, "kept me alive. I sometimes thought about a letter for a week before writing anything. It's something that you must do even if you do not have the leisure of being in prison. To write, you must work methodically, forming your thoughts and prompting other people to think as they read. Writing requires work at both ends. That's what makes it special." (Wei Jingsheng, who spent 18 years in jail in China for writing essays arguing for democracy, quoted by Joel L. Swerdlow in National Geographic)

I hope you enjoyed these quotes. Please send me any that you think should be included by clicking on the quill and paper. Thanks.