"Every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style."

"Short stories are the same: they generally thrive on very severe attention. But it’s an art, not a science, so some writers ... need a certain ornateness to achieve their effect."

"I really dig [Franz Kafka] a lot.  Some of his things are the most thrilling combos of words I have ever read.  If Kafka wrote a crime picture, I’d be there.  I’d like to direct that for sure."

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make."

"The problem is that America's record of translations is worse than any other western country.  Fewer than two percent of books published in America in a given year were written in a language other than English.  Fewer than two percent!  And some of those are textbooks.  If you come down to literature, it's a fraction of one percent.  And so it's very hard for American readers to even know about he work because that work is not translated or published in their language.  In England, it's not great either.  About five percent.  But in places in Western Europe, like in France, it's twenty-five percent and in Germany, it's more than thirty percent.  And so writers are able to be heard in those languages and readers are able to hear them."

"Your first commitment [as a writer] has to be the experience of the reader.  Since fiction is something that's created by words on a page, the way in which you express your commitment to the reader is by using the words on the page to make an effective experience that someone else can have.  This may mean that it's enjoyable, stressful, intense, or something else.  It depends on what kind of writer you are."

"Story's important, so don't let it get buried with words."

"I've used more than one non-sentence in this article alone, and the Grammar Police haven't come after me yet.  If it sounds right to your ears and it works for readers, leave it alone.  Even if it's a fragment."

"There's no substitute for being a prodigal reader, for knowing the unlimited things that can be done with words on a page."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"I hear what I write.  I started writing poetry when I was really young.  I always hear it in my head.  I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don't seem to hear it, don't listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual.  But if it's happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear."

"That is something that I learned from Virginia Woolf, who talks about it most wonderfully in a letter to her friend Vita.  Style, she says, is rhythm—'the wave in the mind'—the wave, the rhythm, are there before the words, and bring the words to fit it."

"With poetry in particular, I just feel like Mother Nature is the best creator of metaphor on the planet." (artist)

"Call it whatever you like—spirit, soul, psyche, personality, ego, unified field, inner being.  It is somewhere intangible, not physical, from whence these creations come.  Yet, by being put down on paper—letters into words, words into paragraphs, paragraphs into an essay—they join the physical realm."

"We don't own [language].  We walk around pretending like we do.  We give it order and we grab it and control it and pretend that that's meaning, but it's an arbitrary, free-floating sign system, which means any other group of people could grab it differently and order it differently and make a different meaning.  It's like the ocean in that way.  You can't grab the ocean."

"Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too." (musician)

"What I most love about writing: the weird alchemy of arranging words in the hope that it produces something magical."

"Poets are caretakers of language, and they know language and action are one."

"A metaphor is a one-sentence fantasy.  It assigns lifelike or magical qualities to ordinary objects.  Metaphor and fantasy are bedfellows—and many fantasies are intended as metaphors; George Orwell's Animal Farm is the best example of this."

"A good portion of the writing process is subconscious and your subconscious mind is arranging things before you see them on the page, so you feel like a character is taking over at certain points.  I think that is more a function of your mind anticipating things.  You've created a constellation of words that have a living quality and they end up feeling like they have a life of their own."

"There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment."

"The thing that you need to never forget is that, when it comes to fiction, everything is made out of words.  What you end up with serves as a catalyst—it's a series of words that interacts with the mind of the reader to create something that feels like a real person to them." (artist)

"Language is that way.  It can be very tactile.  It can go deeper than mere words."

"Punctuation rule enforcement in our culture is blatant.  A Facebook post (from Grammarly.com) on August 23, 2014 reads: 'I don't judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender.  I judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure."

"The happy writer is an open writer: open to experiences, emotions, words, ideas, books, authors, tastes, smells, films, travel."

"I have the right to be certain of the sacredness of speech, and of the sanctity of the right to mock, comment, to argue and to utter."

"The human condition resides in the details, the sense details."

"I work hard at the words, rewriting, finding the right words, the ones where no other word would suit, only those words."

Worlds of Wonder

"I think that most good writers really know grammar.  They may not know the formal structural grammar, but they know when to use bad grammar and when to use good grammar, they know how words fit together and they listen to people talk."

"Writing is overcoming the inertia of a sentence already committed to paper, and recognizing the feeling—a physical feeling—of a sentence that doesn't quite belong or doesn't quite sound right or doesn't quite need all the words you've assigned.  It's to understand the difference between what you're trying to say and what your sentences actually say."

"The readers need to see what you want them to see and feel what you want them to feel, so if the simplest words have the biggest emotional impact, use them."

"I ran with that, the idea that the sentence should have some kind of acoustic value."

Punctuation Saves Lives

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

"Using clichés is basically plagiarism, except instead of stealing from a single writer you're borrowing from the collective consciousness supported by all language."

"Learn every grammar rule there is so that you can make an informed decision about when to defy those rules.  (I never once heard it said of a good writer, 'Oh, so-and-so is such a great grammarian.')"

"When you're writing, you have to get really close to your subject and see the weird and unexpected 'colors' there.  Even a character who's supposed to be incredibly sexy should have flaws.  Even a tragic scene should have those weird moments of humor or joy.  Those little details are the rich part of your writing, and the only thing language should be doing is translating what you 'see' as cleanly as possible to readers."

We Are Made of Words

"Kenneth Koch talked about how language is so fast.  You can say, 'Hannibal crossed the Alps,' and it's done.  That's power."

"What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence 'Write what you know,' ...It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given.  If we write simply about what we know, we never grow.  We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head on.  We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves.  What one should write about is what interests one."

Eats, Shoots & Leaves