Over the years, I have filled several journals with excerpts and quotes that have inspired me, made me laugh, and changed the way I look at things. Below are a few related to writing that I have chosen to share.

“Would you not like to try all sort of lives—one is so very small—but that is the satisfaction of writing—one can impersonate so many people.”  —Katherine Mansfield, Collected Letters, vol. 1

“It’s a terrible thing to be alone—yes it is—it is—but don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath—as terrible as you like—but a mask.”  —Katherine Mansfield, Collected Letters, vol. 1

“I don’t believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or by self-will (although I did believe those things once). The equipment comes with the original package. Yet it is by no means unusual equipment. I believe large numbers of people have at least same talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn’t believe that, writing a book like this would be a waste of time. —Stephen King, On Writing

“I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart’s history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.” —Henry Longfellow, Drift-Wood, “Table-Talk”

“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.” —Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” —Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.” —John Irving, Interview in Writers at Work

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”  —Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“The art of scribes is the hardest of arts. It is difficult toil. It is hard to bend the neck and plow through the pages for three hours. Three fingers write, but the whole body toils. Just as it is sweet for the sailor to reach harbor, so sweet is it for the writer to put the final letter on the page.”  —unknown scribe from the Carolingian era

“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.” —Ernest Hemingway, Letter in Selected Letters

“When writing an autobiography—or memoir—readers will want to know at the start who you are, where you came from, and how you got there. The opening cannot be too abstract, prolix, or dull. Opening words must be inevitable, as if they could not possibly be otherwise. The words must be personal, concrete, vivid—involving the reader in the story immediately.”  —Editor Robert Giroux, editorial advice to Thomas Merton for his memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain

And how did Thomas Merton take his editor’s advice? Check it out:

“On the last day of February 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.”  —Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“I escape prison climbing over stacks of books, fleeing to wherever the words take me. And there I hide amongst dusty pages until the last drop of ink sends me back.”  —Marcus Eddy, The Scribbles of a Lifer (unpublished)

“The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.”  —Renata Adler, Toward a Radical Middle, “Salt into Old Scars”