On Writing: A Collection of quotes and commentaries

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   *“I like a newspaper so I can underline & clip articles.” – Norma Blanton, columnist for THE (Amity, AR) STANDARD, May 31 2012

  * “My writing started with a prayer back when I was 32, and a single mom with two small children” – Judy Linze, Illinois, a member of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum Educational Center’s writers’ retreat, June 4-8, 2012. HPMEC is located in Piggott, AR.

* “… drifted into journalism and never figured out how to drift back out of it.” – Seamus McGraw (January 15 2012)

 * Epigraph? “Time has passed, and that makes all the difference.” – P. Greenberg, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, February 12 2012

* Don’t use “reason why.” Use reason to, reason for, reason that.”-B. Madden, Letter-to-the-editor, AD-G, February 11 2012

* “Good research and good intentions don’t necessarily yield good novels.” – Sarah Fay, New York Times Book Review, October 23 2011, p.15

* A conundrum’s answer [should] contain a pun. [Check Your Knowledge newspaper feature]

* “I think it takes obsession, searching for the details for any artist to be good.” ––Barbra Streisand

* “A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.” ––James Dickey 

* “... [F]orgive your friends for their successes.” ––Dear Abby, February 6, 2010, Hot Springs (AR) Sentinel Record   

* When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.” – Enrique Jardiel Poncela

* “Be brave enough to live life creatively, the creative place where no one else has been.” – Alan Alda

* My idea for a good first line for a story, poem, essay, novel: “She always had a cigarette in her hand.” ––M. Horn’s great granddaughter after M.’s death at 94.

* Interesting usage of a noun as a verb: “...to scythe through...”

* Books can be harder to kick out than termites. – Laura Jofre, AP

* Writing is a profession of failure.” Robert Dugoni, The Writer, February 10 2008, p. 13

* “Get obsessed and stay obsessed.” ––John Irving, cited by Ron Hansen. Ibid

* Two similes found in one day’s newspaper, September 23 2009:

1. “... like grasping open air.” (Editorial, AD-G);

2. “... like hauling smoke in a wheelbarrow.” (Letter-to-the-editor)

* “You want to be a writer, don’t know how or when? / Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.” – Paul Simon (AD-G cryptoquote)

* “Writers make poor subjects for biopics, as they lead, on the whole, pretty dull lives.” (Claire Harman, Jane’s Fame, p.212) As I type this I see a misplaced antecedent. It’s the writers who lead dull lives, not the biopics.

* “[Jane] Austen left out the testosterone in her male characters.”(Ibid, p. 202)

* Paul Greenberg (AD-G) quotes satirist H. L. Mencken’s opinion of Warren G. Harding’s rhetorical style:

             “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” -December 15 2010

* “Our interior lives are confabulated narratives, made of rags of hope and baled with madness. Our crazy frail hearts pitter until they stop.” – Philip Martin, AD-G December 19 2010

* “When I read the latest Arkansas Times poll and saw that John Grisham and not Don Harington or Paul Lake was the best Arkansas writer, I realized there was no point in a duffer like me even trying. So I’m giving up the writing game, getting into the painting game.” ––Jack Butler, Arkansas Times, August 9 1996

* “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” – Italo Calvino

* Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift is a 500-page monologue. –Nathaniel Rich, Harper’s, December 2010, pp. 79-80

* “Saul Bellow’s old men take solace in precise itemization.” Ibid, p. 81. A character in Mr. Sammler’s Planet says, “Knowing the names of things braces people up.”

This must be why I jot down all the words I don’t know—to ‘brace up,’ to feel intellectual, to feel knowledgeable, to feel, well, like a Mensan?

 Then how to feel when a fellow writer chides me for “sending her to the dictionary” when I used “inordinate” instead of “excessive” in an email?