Every writer and artist claims some books as favorites. Oh, the list of books expands and contracts, but some books remain forever. They either leave a permanent impression or speak to a particular moment in time. The eighteen quotes that follow come from the former rather than the latter.
1. Paul Celan
“A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the — surely not always strong — hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward [encounter].” — Paul Celan, Collected Prose
2. Annie Dillard
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. [The work] is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!’” — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
3. Francis Flaherty
“For writers, suppression of emotion is a high crime. If facts are the skeleton of a story, emotion is its heart. And people are emotional about everything. Salsa recipes. Fountain pens. The metric system. Nothing is so trivial or technical that somebody won’t get dreamy-eyed about it, or red in the face.” — Francis Flaherty, The Elements of Story
4. Makoto Fujimura
“[When I] enter into the daily ritual of painting, I rediscover the joy of creating. The process of creating renews my spirit, and I find myself attuned to the details of life rather than being stressed by being overwhelmed. I find myself listening rather than shouting into the void. Creating art opens my heart to see and listen to the world around me, opening a new vista of experience.” — Makoto Fujimura, Refractions
5. Neil Gaiman
“When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.” — Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
6. Ira Glass
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
“A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work wen through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.
“Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” — Ira Glass, The Gap
7. Natalie Goldberg
“In writing, when you are truly on, there’s no writer, no paper, no pen, no thoughts. Only writing does writing—everything else is gone.” — Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
8. Richard Hugo
“Never want to say anything so strongly that you give up the option of finding something better. If you have to say it, you will.” — Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town
9. Anne Lamott
“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
10. Madeleine L’Engle
“Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject. If it’s good art—and there the questions start coming, questions which it would be simpler to evade.” — Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
11. Bret Lott
“She [O’Connor] believed in the art over the artist, for she knew intimately that the artist was a human, rife with his own failures and prejudices, and his days fleeting at best. She understood that the story would be what remained—not on the shelf of a library somewhere, and not as a citation in a book of critical theory, but as a residual element of the soul of the story’s maker. And so the story, in service to its truest Creator [God], had better be good, and had better speak loud and clear about what matters.” — Bret Lott, Letters & Life
12. New American Standard Bible
“My heart overflows with a good theme; / I address my verses to the King; / My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.” — The Sons of Korah, Psalm 45:1, New American Standard Bible
13. Lia Purpura
“To sit with you have to look into the gap in your understanding, not drive the conversation, not know where it’s going. Not know beforehand at all where it’s heading. I read once, there is a quality of legend about freaks…like a person in a fairy tale who stops and demands that you answer a riddle. That’s the space. That open field, where you’re sitting with, and don’t have the answer but an atmosphere of response is forming.” — Lia Purpura, On Looking
14. Rainer Maria Rilke
“To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. I learn it daily, learn it with many pains, for which I am grateful: Patience is all!” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
15. Luci Shaw
“Anything may make us look: a breaking wave, a train whistle, a plummeting gull, an amorous couple. But art and the vision of faith allow us to see. Such seeing demands concentration and persistence. Art and faith require not only perception but [also] work. After the epiphany — the moment of revelation — come the fifty rough drafts, the struggle to enflesh the intangible, the wrestling match with the angel.” — Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones
16. Luke Sullivan
“Being stuck means you have moved through all the easy stuff. […] So don’t be creeped out by those long silences that can happen during creative sessions. You can spend whole days, even weeks, trying very hard and coming up with diddly. But I’ve found it’s only after you’ve suffered these excruciating days of meatloaf-brain that the shiny and beautiful finally presents itself to you. The trick is to stay with it. Suffer through it. Remember, the only way out is through.” — Luke Sullivan, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This!
17. Douglas Wilson
“Your duty as a writer is the same as the respective duties of the plumber, the knee surgeon, the computer repairman, and the architect, which is to make it work. Moreover, your duty is to make it work for the customer, which in this case is the reader.” — Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy
18. Dean Young
“I don’t believe in writer’s block, writing well is very easy; it’s writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.” — Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness