Category Archives: Quotes for Writers

Quote from Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka ( 3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)
Albert Camus, Gabriel García Márquez and Jean-Paul Sartre are among the writers influenced by Kafka’s work; the term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe existential situations like those in his writing. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
Anel P. Albertao posted this amazing Kafka quote on FaceBook.

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”

Do you agree?

Franz Kafka's booksFranz Kafka's Metamorphosis book cover

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Writer Cullen McCullers Quotes

Carson McCullersBorn Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917 in Georgia, she died on September 29, 1967 at age 50. She was a novelist in the Southern Gothic Genre. Her first novel at age 22 was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter about the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a U.S. Southern small town. Known as Carson, not Lula, she married Reeves McCullers in 1937 and divorced him in 1941.Carson McCullers moved to New York where her roommates were Aaron Copland and Salvador Dali and others. Gypsy Rose Lee was among her friends. After World War ll she lived in Paris for a few years. Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams were her close friends.
“In 1945 Carson and Reeves McCullers remarried. Three years later while severely depressed she attempted suicide. In 1953 Reeves tried to convince her to commit suicide with him, but she fled and Reeves killed himself in their Paris hotel with an overdose of sleeping pills. Her bittersweet play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1957), drew upon these traumatic experiences.”  McCullers had several strokes since her youth and by age 31 her left side was paralyzed. She also suffered from alcoholism. She lived in Nyack, New York from 1945 to 1967 where she died after a brain hemorrhage.” McCullers dictated her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare (1999), during the final months of her life.” (Information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_McCullers.)
Carson McCullers Quotes:
“How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.”
“There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
While time, The endless idiot, runs screaming ’round the world.”
“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
“The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.”
“The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.”
 “The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.”
 Flannery O’Connor said about McCullers’ book, Clock Without Hands:  “I believe it is the worst book I have ever read.”
Have any of you read work by Cullen McCullers?  I haven’t. But Flannery O’Connor’s books were influential in my love of short stories and my interest in becoming a writer.

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Richard Peck Writer Quotes

richard Peck writing by lights of bridgesRichard Peck, born April 10, 1934 (age 81)is an American novelist, particularly for young adults. He taught junior high and high school English. He left teaching in 1971 to write his first novel, Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt,  in 1972, in which “A teenage girl struggles to understand her place within her family and in the world.” He has written a book each year since then, totaling 41 books in 41 years.

When the author is not traveling, he works at an L-shaped desk, which affords a sunny window. He writes everything on an electric typewriter because “it has to be a book from the first day,” he explains. He has no daily routine because of all the traveling he does, but follows a very disciplined writing process. He writes each page six times, then places it in a three-ring binder with a DePauw University cover (“a talisman,” he calls this memento from his alma mater). When he feels that he has gotten a page just right, he takes out another 20 words. “After a year, I’ve come to the end. Then I’ll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I’ll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise.” He always hands in a completed manuscript, and his editor is his first reader.

Peck believes each book should be a question, not an answer

Here are some of his quotes:

“Ironically, it was my students who taught me to be a writer, though I had been hired to teach them,” he said in a speech published in Arkansas Libraries.”They taught me that a novel must entertain first before it can be anything else. I learned that there is no such thing as a ‘grade reading level’; a young person’s ‘reading level’ and attention span will rise and fall according to his degree of interest. I learned that if you do not have a happy ending for the young, you had better do some fast talking.”.[citation needed]

“You never write about yourself; you just always wind up having written about yourself.”—Oct 10, 2013, to a library full of 4th graders in Pleasanton, CA.
“Nobody but a reader ever became a writer.” – Aug 5, 2013, SCBWI conference
.

Information from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Peck_%28writer%29#Quotes

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Nancy Kress Science Fiction Writer Quotes

Nancy Kress what's all neededNancy Kress is an American science fiction writer, born in January, 1948. Her 1991 novella, Beggars in Spain, won the Hugo and Nebula awards. Since then she expanded it into a novel.

Nancy Kress Beggars in SpainIn 2012 she also won the Nebula Award for Best Novella for “After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall.”

Nancy Kress Before the fall, during and after

Nancy Kress with open book be 3Nancy Kress fiction about screw ups

Nancy Kress head shot

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Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

K Porter on a stampKatherine Ann Porter, born May 15, 1890 in Texas, died September, 1980 in Maryland, was a Pulitzer Prize- winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She was known for her penetrating insight and her work with dark themes such as betrayal, death, and the origin of human evil.

She was married and divorced four times. For ten years she taught at four universities, one of which was Stanford. Her unconventional manner of teaching made her popular with students. ( wikipedia.org)

K Porter moment now happyK Porter quote gullet

K Porter quote story like a spiderK Porter quote thought of him like smoky cloud

K Porter truth result fiction

K Porter quote past where you left it

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