“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
-Anton Chekhov
Source: Goodreads, which also told me that Sunday (January 29) was Chekhov’s birthday. He was born in 1860.
Tag Archive for ‘Quotation of the Week’ 
Quotation of the Week: Anton Chekhov
Quotation of the Week: Thrity Umrigar
“But that’s not what this story is about. It’s about how the worlds of journalism and fiction writing are not as unimaginably different as one might think. About how, in the end, there are only two kinds of writing—good writing and the mediocre kind. The transition from one genre to another is not as difficult as some people think.”
–Thrity Umrigar
Source: Journalist/novelist/memoirist Thrity Umrigar’s contribution to the Nieman Reports “Writing the Book” issue.
Quotation of the Week: Edith Pearlman
Q: What is your best piece of advice to new and emerging fiction writers?A. Read. Read everything. Read all the time. Write every so often.
Source: Interview with Ether Writer, Edith Pearlman.
I’ve just finished reading Pearlman’s latest (and much-lauded) collection, Binocular Vision. It’s outstanding.
Quotation of the Week: Charles Johnson
The following snippet appeared on Twitter last Saturday as a live-tweet from the Modern Language Association’s 2012 convention in Seattle. It comes from a session that was billed as “A Creative Conversation with Charles Johnson,” with Linda F. Selzer presiding.
Selzer: “You’ve written four novels.”
Johnson: “I’ve written ten novels. Published four.”
Source: @Brent_Newsom
(Johnson, let us remember, has won the National Book Award for fiction, NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and many other honors.)
Quotation of the Week: Scott Nadelson
Q: “What advice would you give your younger self?”
“I think it would be the same advice I give myself now, whenever I feel frustrated or lost, whenever I worry that I’ll never write another decent book or story or sentence: Don’t take yourself too seriously.
I once had a teacher who told me a story about a conversation he had with Grace Paley. He was working with her while at Stanford, complaining to her about how badly the writing was going, how tortured he was by the process. And she turned to him and said, ‘You don’t have to do it, you know. No one’s sitting around waiting for your next story.’
It may be devastating to realize that no one but you is going to care if you stop writing. But it’s also wonderfully freeing. All pressures and expectations drop away. You don’t have to worry about shaping the future of literature or saving the world. You can just put one word after another for the simple pleasure of making something out of nothing.”
Source: Interview with Scott Nadelson, Fiction Writers Review
