Sarah Stodola > Quotes

“He may have found himself ultimately unable to let go of the structure that teaching brought to his life.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Orwell came to denounce Basic English as a negative force on nuanced thinking, then caricatured it with the propagandizing Newspeak.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Junot Díaz spent ten years laboring over The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, at one point becoming so hopeless that he made a list of alternate careers he might pursue once it was clear he could no longer be a writer. And then he kept going.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The way Smith sees it, this kind of approach denotes a certain category of writer: the Micro Manager. Authors fall into one of two primary camps, she explained in her 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind.691 Macro Planners work out the structure of their novels and then write within that structure. Micro Managers, on the other hand, don’t rely on an overarching configuration (don’t even conceive of one), but rather home in on each sentence, one by one, and each sentence, as they come to it, becomes the only thing that exists. If there is a spectrum starting with Macro Planners on one end and Micro Managers on the other, Smith would be somewhere to the right of the page. Smith’s writing is entirely incremental and cumulative. The grand plan is that there is no grand plan; working things out ahead of time ruins everything, “feels disastrous.”She prefers the writing of a novel as a process of discovery. “The thinking goes on on the page,” not beforehand.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“was just getting to the age when New York no longer promised an adventure down every block, and here I was on this tiny peninsula where everywhere I looked I found something new or beautiful or exhilarating.”
― Sarah Stodola, The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach – An Exploration of Global Resort Culture and Climate Change from Monte Carlo to Miami Beach

“Kafka was hardly able to separate the writing of literature from life itself.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“(“I write like a genius”)”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Price has always read widely and voraciously, and continues to do so today; “I read so much I can’t tell you what I read on Wednesday,” he has said.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“He claimed to have rewritten the ending of A Farewell to Arms precisely thirty-two times,470 and likewise claimed to rewrite first chapters of his novels forty to fifty times.471”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, writing can be a grueling, unforgiving business, but even at its worst it’s better than having a regular job.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Rushdie then writes for four hours or so, during which he might write two to four pages319—over the years, he’s learned that beyond that chunk of time, the output becomes mush.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Like so many authors, Price confesses that he hates writing. “The only thing worse than writing is not writing,” he once told the London Telegraph.152 Which could be the key to the whole thing—choosing the anxiety of writing over the small death of not doing it.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“(In one of the great ironies of literary history, Kerouac went to his grave having never learned to drive.)”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“By nature, he narrated his own life in his head, as if it were a story in midconstruction. “For fifteen years or more,” he wrote, “I was carrying out a literary exercise . . . [T]his was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The writing life can be a slog, with twelve-hour days in self-imposed isolation, endless rewrites, hundreds of pages discarded by ornery editors, and a life’s work dismissed at the stroke of an overly clever critic’s pen. Writers tend to live within their own minds, rarely working with others, socializing with their comrades largely to gripe about the publishing industry, not to collaborate in the midst of a project.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.”460”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“But in the place of perfection, they possess the quality of perseverance and a willingness to recognize their own shortcomings.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“When you’re writing a novel,” he says, “it’s so easy to have odd bits of laziness slip in. Poetry is a way of reminding myself to pay attention to language”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“To write a book is to make a Faustian contract in reverse. To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual daily life.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The Newspeak of 1984 was inspired largely by the work of the linguist and philosopher C. K. Ogden, who created a simplified version of English that he believed would become a universal language. Early on, Orwell was a proponent of Basic English, as Ogden named it—it satisfied Orwell’s admiration for straightforward, clear language. But in the years just before writing 1984, Orwell came to denounce Basic English as a negative force on nuanced thinking, then caricatured it with the propagandizing Newspeak.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem. Genius is far more tedious, far less romantic, far more rote, far less effortless, than we imagine it. The great writers in this book do not by and large put the right words on the right page in the right order on the first try. But in the place of perfection, they possess the quality of perseverance and a willingness to recognize their own shortcomings.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Joyce was remarkably consistent in his sluggish, patient progress. Before Ulysses, he worked on his first two books, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for ten years collectively. By the time he arrived at his final work, Finnegans Wake, the pace had slowed even further: He gave a full fifteen over to that book,474 and never during that time felt inadequate, or that his talent may have slipped. Just the opposite, in fact: “I have discovered I can do anything with language I want,”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“On Valentine’s Day 1989, the prosaic customs of Rushdie’s daily routine were interrupted in a way that most writers can hardly imagine. On that day, the Iranian ayatollah issued a call for his death for alleged crimes against Islam committed by writing The Satanic Verses. Rushdie immediately went into hiding under the protection of the British government, and was clandestinely relocated to at least thirty different houses and flats over the following few years.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“It’s no surprise that Wharton believed reading to be the crucial element in the development of a writer.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“She tended to latch on to writers who fell into one of two categories: those who simply wrote beautifully, and those who challenged the rules of fiction or other conventions in ways that appealed to her own goals to experiment with words through fiction and to use fiction to probe consciousness—conventional plot was never a primary component of her work. But it was the act of reading itself, more than any one or two or seven writers, that influenced Woolf, as a daily exercise in intellectual stimulation and as a means of revving the engine for her own work.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Being alone has a power over me that never fails,”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality,” he wrote in “Why I Write.” Surely the pseudonym played some role in that effacement.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Bloomsbury Group was born. She was a central member of this loose collection of intellectuals that favored the pursuit of art, knowledge, and enjoyment over the time’s prevailing values, in which bourgeois propriety and public service ruled the day.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors