Table Scraps: Primarily for Writers

If you're a writer you are probably like me. You enjoy reading what other writers say about writing. One of the writers in this list once wrote, or said, that he takes more pride in how many books he's read than how many he has written.

If you're not a writer, I'm certain that many of these table scraps will speak to you in some way or another anyway. Take your time. Relax. Chew slowly. Enjoy the flavor of the ideas as well as the words. 

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"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
--Elmore Leonard

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero. A bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. "
--Walter Pater

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."
--Washington Irving

“Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”
--Jorge Luis Borges

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."
--Italo Calvino

"More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."
--Kazuo Ishiguro

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
--E.L. Doctorow

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
--David Foster Wallace

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."
--Carlos Fuentes

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
--Carlos Fuentes

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me."
--Raymond Carver

"True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
--John Gardner

And One Last Quote
"A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing."
--Don Roff