Quotes of the week

One must be ruthless with one’s own writing or someone else will be.
—John Berryman

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
—Elie Wiesel

Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook.
—JANE KENYON

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely homework.
—Joyce Carol Oates

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.
—M.F.K. Fisher

There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
—Flannery O’Connor

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of suprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.
—H.G. Wells

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.
—P.T. Anderson

I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
—Annie Proulx—