The Quotable Writer

I’m putting together a church service…it was suggested to me that I might speak about “change” or transitions in some way. As always, I’ve spent several hours on Bartleby.com and a wonderful series of websites maintained by Michael Garofalo, collecting quotations. Keyword searches tend to cast a wide net, and I’ve got a few to share with the writers on my f-list.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
Philip Roth, quoted in George Plimpton ed Writers at Work

In a certain sense, women who write fiction and political feminists comes from two different camps. One is interested in change and revolution; the other, women who write serious fiction, believe that life doesn’t change that much, that we all struggle perennially with the same old painful issues that are true for all people: how to deal with unexplained suffering, how to survive a sorrowful universe, how to heal yourself, how to restore yourself when that seems difficult and impossible (given what life deals out to people). That’s not a very revolutionary approach to take—to speak of sorrow and suffering as inevitable and as part of the human condition. And yet all serious writers have always spoken that way.
Sue Miller (b. 1943), U.S. novelist and story writer. As quoted in Listen to Their Voices, ch. 14 (1993).

If none of us ever read a book that was “dangerous,” had a friend who was “different” or joined an organization that advocated “change,” we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. Whose fault is that? Not really [McCarthy’s]. He didn’t create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully.
Edward R Murrow, on Senator Joseph R McCarthy’s accusations about Communists in government, See It Now CBS TV 7 Mar 54

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you venture too far.
Erica Jong, U.S. author. In an essay in The Writer on Her Work, ch. 13 (1980).

For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.
Joyce Cary (1888–1957), British author. Interview in Writers at Work, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1958).

When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Riviera, I must make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, or Ed Whelen, or whatever my hero’s name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.
Robert Benchley (1889–1945), U.S. writer, humorist. No Poems or Around the World Backwards and Sideways, “How I Create,” Harper & Brothers (1932)

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.
Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978), U.S. art critic, author. The Tradition of the New, preface (1960).

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free- floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader’s full attention.
William Burroughs (b. 1914), U.S. author. The Western Lands, ch. 3 (1987).