Lori Rader-Day > Lori's Quotes

“I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt.”
― Richard Bausch

“Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
― Stephen King

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on.”
― Adam Johnson

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

“That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? ”
― Ariel Gore

“A writer with her work needs to be like a dog with a bone all the time. She needs to know where she's hidden it. Where she's stored the good stuff. She needs to keep gnawing at it, even after all the meat seems to be gone. When a student of mine says (okay, whines) that she's impatient, or tired, or the worst: isn't it good enough? this may be harsh, but she loses just a little bit of my respect. Because there is no room for impatience, or exhaustion, or self-satisfaction, or laziness. All of these really mean, simply, that the inner censor has won the day.”
― Dani Shapiro

“Quite often somebody will say, 'What year do your books take place?' and the only answer I can give is, in childhood.”
― Beverly Cleary

“...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Wild Girls

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ”
― Boris Pasternak

“Birth, death . . .?’ ‘And nappies, madam. Things men don’t do.”
― Catriona McPherson, After the Armistice Ball

“That kind of flabby sentiment – thinking that there is good in everyone – is responsible for a great deal of harm.”
― Catriona McPherson, After the Armistice Ball

“What has she done to deserve such scorn?' I said.
He had the grace to look uncomfortable as he answered. 'Not her in particular, miss,' he said, 'Just her sort. People like her in general, I mean.'
'Oh Harry,' I said, 'there is no such thing as people in general. Everyone is someone very particular.”
― Catriona McPherson, Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

“I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.”
― Dashiell Hammett

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
― George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism

“When you're struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.”
― Sara Paretsky, Brush Back

“A god who cares more about a little water on the head than my daughter's character is not a deity I want her to spend eternity with.”
― Sara Paretsky (Brush Back)

“Some men can only admire independent women at a distance.”
― Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only

“Time is the best killer.”
― Agatha Christie

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“Make your characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing.”
― John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

“If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.”
― John McPhee

“It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”
― John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
― Miles Davis

“(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters