“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart beating. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
American writer
Raymond Carver on writing
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
Dorothy Parker on her writing method
Q: How do you actually write out a story? Do you write out a draft and then go over it or what?
Parker: It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence–no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
Q: How do you name your characters?
Parker: The telephone book and from the obituary columns.
Q: Do you keep a notebook?
Parker: I tried to keep one, but I never could remember where I put the damn thing. I always say I’m going to keep one tomorrow.
Q: How do you get the story down on paper?
Parker: I wrote in longhand at first, but I’ve lost it. I use two fingers on the typewrtiter. I think it’s unkind of you to ask. I know so little about the typewriter that once I bought a new one because I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.
from Newspaper Days by H.L. Mencken
“When A annoys or injuries B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”
advice on being a writer from William Saroyan
The most solid advice, though, for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
Leonard Durso 