Some favourite quotations on writing

"I heard some writer say that his father was a truck driver, and you know what, never in his life did that man get truck driver's block."
(Unknown)

"In order to write well you must first learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers. Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false. It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire."
(Al Alvarez)

"True style - which is what I mean by voice - can come in any form provided it is alive and urgent enough to take hold of the reader and and make him understand that what is being said really matters."
(Al Alvarez)

"Character is plot"
(Graham Greene)

"It's like making a movie. All sorts of accidental things will happen after you've set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you start to go with that; you get some footage of that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you're watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up."
(Kurt Vonnegut)

"For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort, and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownie. The meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long existed in my garden of Adonis . Mine too is the setting, mine the characters. All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary."
(RL Stevenson describes how he wrote 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. His 'Brownie' is what he calls his dream character or director.)

"Stories are fundamental to human life. I think we need stories as much as we need food and air and water and sleep, because stories are the way we organise reality. Reality is a thunderous cacophony of millions of impressions surging in on us at every moment. By isolating fragments of that invasion, and being able to articulate them and then link them over time, which is what a story does, we are enabled to think about ourselves in the present, in the past, in the future. Without stories, we literally wouldn't be able to live."
(Paul Auster 2001)

"They do sometimes publish difficult books, so don't despair."
(Doris Lessing)