Wise words

Thoughts on Art from creative people born March 28:

from Russian writer and political activist Maxim Gorky (Na dne, Mat', Destvo, V lyudyakh, Moi univeritety, Rasskazy 1922–1924, Delo Artamonovykh, Zhizn' Klima Samgina) (1868-1936):

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.

Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.

In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same.

Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.

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from American fiction writer and essayist Nelson Algren (The Neon Wilderness, The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side, Chicago: City on the Make) (1909-1981):

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length. . . . A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

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from Peruvian Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa (La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, Conversación en la catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, La fiesta del chivo) (b. 1936):

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.

Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.

Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work—a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me—all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

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from American novelist Russell Banks (Continental Drift, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Darling) (b. 1940):

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

Lists of books we re-read and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

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from American Tony- and Emmy-winning actor Ken Howard (Child’s Play, Grey Gardens); also known for 1776 and The White Shadow (1944-2016):

When television gets in trouble is when it forgets that it all begins with the written word.

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from Franco–Belgian playwright, novelist, and short story writer Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (Le Visiteur, Enigma Variations, Le Cycle de l'invisible, L'Evangile selon Pilate, Ma Vie avec Mozart) (b. 1960):

When I start a book, it's every day. There is no Saturday, no Sunday. It's every day, because if I stop one day, I'm afraid of losing the book and losing the energy.

I wanted to become a director before I wanted to become a writer. When I was 10, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, “Walt Disney.” I wanted to make films. But I wasn't offered a camera. I was offered language. So I started telling stories in the theatre and then in my novels.

I consider a house without books or a piano to be unfurnished.

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from American fiction writer Jennifer Weiner (Cannie Shapiro series, In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes, The Littlest Bigfoot series) (b. 1970):

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me—white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

The difference between people who believe they have books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed persistence—the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day—the belief, even in the face of obstacles, that you've got something worth saying.

Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.

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from American novelist Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, Chasing Harry Winston, Revenge Wears Prada) (b. 1977):

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories—so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

So much of writing is done alone in a room in sweatpants, with only the Internet for company.

It's the hardest thing in the world to dedicate to writing, but if you do that even once a week, after six months or a year you'll have something substantial.