J Burton > J's Quotes

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“Once you’ve got to the end, and you know what happens, it’s your job to make it look like you knew exactly what you were doing all along”
― Neil Gaiman

“Love how editing makes you more confident with your book ...but also makes you want to set it on fire at the same time.”
― Kira Hawke

“Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.”
― Samuel S. Vaughan, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do

“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.”
― Elie Wiesel

“But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by one--at peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“There is no great writing, only great rewriting.”
― Justice Louis Brandeis

“A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“When you write a story, you are telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story...Your stuff starts out being just for you...but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right, as right as you can...it belongs to anyone who wants to read it, or criticise it.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette

“Depression is like a headache or true love or any of those indefinable concepts. If you've never been there, you don't know what it's like until you're too far in to stop the process.”
― Tim Sandlin, Skipped Parts

“The worst things in life are the best things gone bad - Tim Sandlin”
― Tim Sandlin

“Another thing your teachers didn't tell you is that one day, arguments over whether or not to capitalize the word internet would constitute half your workday and lead to severed ties with many people you once considered close friends and family.”
― Emmy J. Favilla, A World Without "Whom": The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age

“What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject?--

Remorselessly sacrifice everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude, and effect.

Accentuate everything that sets the main idea in relief, so that the impression be colourful, picturesque. It's sufficient that the rest be in its proper place, but in half-tone. That is what gives to style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and effect.

- Constantin Georges Romain Héger, teacher to Charlotte Brontë”
― Claire Harman

“Edit your author as you would be edited.”
― Barbara Sjoholm, An Editor's Guide to Working with Authors

“[S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.”
― Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes

“[I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!”
― Mary Roberts Rinehart, Writing Is Work

“This is fictional time, where events play out and possibilities are exhausted, so that meaning can emerge.”
― Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes

“Editing is like walking across a room strewn with rose petals and thorns. When you can walk across mostly unbloodied, you're finished.”
― Richard Due

“Length is weight in fiction, pretty much.”
― Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes

“A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.”
― Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes

“Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.”
― Stephanie Roberts

“Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.”
― Verlyn Klinkenborg

“There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)
A good novel editor is invisible.”
― Terri Windling

“I've reached that final moment of editing a book—the one where the text manifests as a living breathing person and starts slugging me in the face.”
― Richard Due

“Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

“The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.

The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”

The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.

The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”

The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”

But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”

My bones said, “Write the poems.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers

“There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.”
― Lynda Barry, What It Is