Annie Dillard on the world

“The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, and he never goes anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls this the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/drives my green age.” This is what we know. The rest is gravy.”

(Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

Salman Rushdie on the poet’s work

“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson on universal threads

“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”

Willa Cather on kinds of writing

‘Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.’

Ron Carlson on the aphorism ‘write what you know’

“I always write about my own experiences, whether I’ve had them or not.”

Richard Wright, hurling words into darkness and waiting for echoes

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

Dorothy Parker on favors

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style’. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Martha Graham on drive

“No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Enrique Jardiel Poncela on effort

“When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.”

Annie Dillard on how to write

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”