“[T]here is but one art: to omit! O, if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad out of a daily newspaper.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to his cousin, 1883
Category Archives: Quotes
Quotes
“All literature carries exile within it… Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth.”
– Roberto Bolaño, “Exiles,” Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches (1998–2003)
Quotes
“It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the drives if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return by the mazings along which its development leads. …For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to make ever more complicated mazings before reaching its aim of death. These mazings to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative drives, would thus present us today with the picture of the phenomena of life.”
– Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Quotes
“A reviewer said about my third book, a collection of linked stories, that if I kept going in this direction (i.e., toward concision), I’d wind up writing books composed of one very beautiful word. He meant it as a put-down, but to me it was wild praise.”
– David Shields, “Life is Short; Art is Shorter,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 May 2011
Quotes
“Writing is about expressing something new and exploring the form in new ways. So unless you want to churn out thrillers or misery memoirs, you can’t work from a pattern book. You need to autodidact.”
– Will Self, in Janet Murray’s “Can You Teach Creative Writing?” The Guardian 10 May 2011 [p. 1 of the EducationGuardian section]
Quotes
“The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away.”
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotes
“Sal thinks W. spends far too much time on revisions. His book was better before he started working on it, she tells me.”
– Lars Iyer, Spurious, 2011
Quotes
“The best way I can articulate it [what makes a piece of fiction work] is to say that a piece of fiction — or really any work of art — has to have at its core some kind of irretrievable loss. There are an infinite number of irretrievable losses — we experience new ones every day.”
– David Bezmozgis, The New Yorker 14 June 2010
Quotes
“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”
– A. A. Milne, Wisdom From Pooh (London: Methuen, 2001)
Quotes
“For I too think the back view of a finely-formed woman the loveliest view…”
– Wilkie Collins, letter to Napoleon Sarony, 19 March 1887
ANDREW GALLIX 