Jack Spratt

120725 15:24 for Kathleen Maher
without credentials except for the wounds in my heart -- as Rumi might say or possibly said -- is to become sovereign in the Self who writes. His, Rumi's love shows as does yours, forget how, finding the why to write; the heart knows the brain is merely seven pounds of tofu. I am too old to consider something the implied length of a novel and have therefore no inclination to do so though should I live a few more years I might. I have empathy for but no sympathy for myself. Let this humble collection slowly expanding as I find them be a referent point for idle moments of doubt . . . may I be a surrogate father to you? It would be a pleasure to share my sense of teaching to see what you're looking at.

Writer's Quotes

088. How to Write a Chinese Poem
A well-known Japanese poet was asked how to compose a Chinese poem.

"The usual Chinese poem is four lines," he explains. "The first line contains the initial phase; the second line, the continuation of that phase; the third line turns from this subject and begins a new one; and the fourth line brings the first three lines together. A popular Japanese song illustrates this:

Two daughters of a silk merchant live in Kyoto.
The elder is twenty, the younger, eighteen.
A soldier may kill with his sword.
But these girls slay men with their eyes.

"A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams." ~ René Char
"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses." --Jean Cocteau
"A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears." --Gertrude Stein
"All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.” --Ernest Hemingway
"All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry." --G. K. Chesterton
"Art is the triumph over chaos. --John Cheever

"Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.”
--Eudora Welty in On Writing

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
--Ernest Hemingway

‘And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.’

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Once the words are nested in the places ‘ordained’ for them — ‘ordained’ is a wonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntactic structures — they are tied by ligatures of relationships to one another. They are subjects or objects or actions or descriptives or indications of manner, and as such they combine into a statement about the world, that is, into a meaning that one can contemplate, admire, reject, or refine.” --Stanley Fish on Anthony Burgess sentence from his 1968 novel Enderby Outside
“As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).”  --Fernando Pessoa
“Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?” --Anne Lamott
"Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created — nothing.” --F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.” --Muriel Rukeyser
COLBERT: What does it take for a celebrity to make a successful (children’s) book, what do I gotta do?
SENDAK: You’ve started already by being an idiot. That is the very first demand.
"Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.” --Charles Bukowski
"Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” --Stephen King
"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a ‘logical consistency,’ or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.” --Joyce Carol Oates in The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
"First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these things in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.” --Ernest Hemingway
“Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite.” -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult to come by.” --Ralph Ellison
"I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me."--Sir Walter Raleigh
"I don't write for children. I write --- and somebody say, 'That's for children!' I didn’t set out to make children happy or make life better for them, or easier for them." --Maurice Sendak
“I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love ... even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.” --Fernando Pessoa
"I have been nothing ... but there is tomorrow." --Louis L'Amour
"I never thought of myself as a writer, but the simplest thing seemed to be to put a piece of paper in the roller and start typing." --Cynthia Friedman
"I too must attempt a way by which I can raise myself above the ground, and soar triumphant through the lips of men. ." --Virgil
“I write to define myself — an act of self-creation — part of my process of becoming.” --Susan Sontag
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.” --Fernando Pessoa
"If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs." --John Clare
“If you wish to be a writer, write.” --Epicurus
"Listen, then make up your own mind.” --Gay Talese
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.” -- Cyril Connolly
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” --T. S. Eliot
“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of the seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.” --Fernando Pessoa
"Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life." --George Sand
"Personality is everything in art and poetry." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"[Pared-down prose] is a real loss, not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction to ‘omit needless words’ (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem.” --Adam Haslett
“Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme.’ --John Fletcher
“One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” -- James Baldwin
"Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story… humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels, etc., etc. Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing… and as unobtrusive.” --Ray Bradbury
"Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life." --William Hazlitt
"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth." --Samuel Johnson
“Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. (Sr.)” --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr,
"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them." --John Ruskin
The impetus towards more personal, more autobiographical writing, dates back at least a century and a half before Life Studies. In February 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in a letter to Thomas Poole: "I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book — let him relate the events of his own life with honesty — not disguising the feelings that accompanied them." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet)
"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being
nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” --Wallace Stevens in Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
"The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one." --John Ruskin
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” --Ernest Hemingway
"The poet doesn't invent. He listens." --Jean Cocteau
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” --Wallace Stevens
"The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.” --Tom Wolfe in Advice to Writers
"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.” -Eleanor Roosevelt in The Autobiography Of Eleanor Roosevelt
"The writer is not…an all-powerful architect of our reading experience. The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it. A film begins with a writer producing a screenplay. But it is the director who brings the screenplay to life, filling in most of the details. So it is with any story. A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. The catalyst is the reader’s imagination." --Gottschall
"There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.” --Ernest Hemingway
“To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.” --Fernando Pessoa
"To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June." -Jean Paul
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. (Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature stimulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”) -- Fernando Pessoa  ―The Book of Disquiet
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” --Mark Twain
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” --Anais Nin
"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck." --Iris Murdoch
“Writing is like paying myself a formal visit…” --Fernando Pessoa
“Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. . . ” " . . I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work — which meant that life did not feel like work." --Ray Bradbury
"Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves." --Aldous Huxley
"Write something, even if it's just a suicide note." --Anonymous +f
"Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation." --Laurence Sterne
"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” -Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” --Saul Bellow
"You should never read just for ‘enjoyment.’ Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick ‘hard books.’ Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, ‘I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.’ Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of ‘literature’? That means fiction, too, stupid.” --John Waters in Role Models