writers

Have tea, might write,_ Laura returned.

I think. I write. I am.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wrote something _ stories, poetry, articles, newsletters, letters. Most writers can't help themselves! It's a compulsion.

Do Engineers have stories, Jack?" he asked. "What?" Jack said, without moving."Stories. Myths. Things to keep the boredom out on a long shift.""I think they play cards, mostly," Jack answered. It was a lie, but he told it with surprising deftness; not a waver in his voice or a hesitation in his words. Only the tightening of his shoulders told Ellis he was lying.

It is so small secret that many writers are also alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, or habitual wearers of blue jeans (in some cases all of the above).

...a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....

Maybe you didn__ need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn__ need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you__ lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream.

One Bagatelle, and I__l raise you a novel,_ Megan had tweeted back.__riting for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,_ Laura returned.__riting for me,_ Megan had typed.____l write you a tea fortune.___o deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.

...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;

Some writers may never create a work. Their purpose is to help others create their first word.

My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

...people quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression...

Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof Ihope there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am notunderstood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profoundis couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentenceis printed in a different character shall be judged to contain somethingextraordinary either of wit or sublime.

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.