If there is nowadays a backlash against fiction for not dealing with “the real world”, such poppycock, then I deduce it’s a backlash against imagination, which puts before the mind what was not there before. If we ever lose our awe before this complex emanation from the personality, then we will indeed be ready for the machine age, the hegemony of incessant data and dumbed-down reading.
Paul West
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_West_(writer)
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
Marc Chagall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall
Fast is fine but accuracy is final. You must learn to be slow in a hurry.
Wyatt Earp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyatt_Earp
Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.
Nick Tosches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Tosches
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
John Updike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike
The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.
Raymond Chandler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler
Talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.
Maya Angelou
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou
Detail
I was watching a robin fly after a finch – the smaller bird
chirping with excitement, the bigger, its breast blazing, silent
in light-winged earnest chase – when, out of nowhere
over the chimneys and the shivering front gardens,
flashes a sparrowhawk headlong a light brown burn
scorching the air from which it simply plucks
like a ripe fruit the stopped robin, whose two or three
cheeps of terminal surprise twinkle in the silence
closing over the empty street when the birds have gone
about their own business, and I began to understand
how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small
elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth
strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.
Eamon Grennan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_Grennan
What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
