Posts Tagged‘Quotation of the Week’

Home » Quotation of the Week » Page 26

Quotation of the Week: Joshua Henkin

by Erika Dreifus on
4

“Every writer is faced with the same question: do you write about what you know or what you don’t know? Some of my writing students, particularly my undergraduates, err to one extreme or the other. They write simply what they know, which is a transcript of Friday night’s keg party, or simply what they don’t know, which is Martians. What they need to do—and here I’m quoting a former writing teacher of mine—is write what they know about what they don’t know or what they don’t know about what they know.”

Source: Joshua Henkin, “Risk,” Glimmer Train Bulletin #35

Quotation of the Week: Richard Marius

by Erika Dreifus on
6

Here’s a favorite from one of my own teachers, Richard Marius:

“All writers create. I am always annoyed to hear fiction and poetry called ‘creative’ writing as if writing that explains, describes, and narrates – nonfiction – should somehow be relegated to the basement of the writing enterprise to dwell with the pails and the pipes. To assume that only fiction and poetry are ‘creative’ is to imagine that fiction writers and poets are somehow superior to scholars, journalists, and others who report, explain, and describe. A good case may be made for the proposition that the most truly original and creative writers in our society today work in nonfiction – Tom Wolfe, Gloria Emerson, Roger Rosenblatt, Carl Schorske, Joan Didion, Joe McGinniss, John McPhee, Garry Wills, Robert Caro, David McCullough, Roger Angell, Barbara Tuchman, and a host of others.”

Source: Marius, A Writer’s Companion, first edition (New York: Knopf, 1985), 15.

Quotation of the Week: Anton Chekhov

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

“I saw everything, so it is not a question of what I saw, but how I saw.”

Source: Letter from Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, September 11, 1890, excerpted in How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight from His Own Letters and Work, edited and introduced by Piero Brunello and Lena Lencek, and translated by Lena Lencek.

Quotation of the Week: Mario Vargas Llosa (trans. Natasha Wimmer)

by Erika Dreifus on
5

The definining characteristic of the literary vocation may be that those who possess it experience the exercise of their craft as its own best reward, much superior to anything they might gain from the fruits of their labors. That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.

–Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist (translated by Natasha Wimmer)