THE BROTHERHOOD (AND SISTERHOOD) OF WRITERS


Work till your ink be dry, and with your tears
Moist it again, and frame some feeling line
That may discover such integrity.

William Shakespeare
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona"

Ah, ye nights of the pen! May honour be your shield,
and truth tip your lances! Be gentle to all gentle
people. Be modest to women. Be tender to children.
And as for the Ogre Humbug, out sword and have at him!
William Makepeace Thackeray

"To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousands of journalists."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

"To write is in some way to cut the seemingly automatic pattern to violence, destructiveness and death wish. To write is to put the seeming insignificance of human existance into a different perspective. It is the need, the wish, and please God, the ability, to reorder our physical faith."

Alfred Kazin

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art."

William Faulkner

"He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

William Faulkner


I often ask people what is their definition of a "writer." They usually tell me: "Somebody who has published books or articles" or "A person who makes their living by writing." I disagree. I think somebody who writes everyday and looks at the workaday world through the prism of literature and words is a writer. Period. If a person everyday honestly strives to get at the heart of a matter and glean the truth out of the complexity of this world and we human beings through the written word, than that person is a writer, in my opinion. It is a matter of attitude and a way of life, not how you pay your bills or whether you have talent or not.
      "To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

      "You must write every single day of your life.

      "You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

      "You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

      "I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

      "I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

      "May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise.

      "Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury