“Bukowski wrote about women, drinking, and horses. I write about men, drinking, and cats.”
Inspiration
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Category Archives: quotes
Ray Bradbury on Perseverance
“You have to feel the editors are idiots or misconceived. We all do that. It’s wrong, but it’s a way of surviving. I try to teach young writers to say the same thing. You sit down at the typewriter again and do more work and try to get a body of work done so you can look at it and become your own teacher. If you do fifty-two stories it’s better than doing three, because you can’t judge anything from three stories. It’s very hard to write fifty-two stories in a row and have them all be bad. Almost impossible. The psychological benefits from my first sale, which I got no money for, had to last me for a year before I made my next sale. That year I sold two more stories and had a little extra residue of belief.”
-Ray Bradbury, Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives by Lawrence Grobel
Robertson Davies
Excerpts from Tempest-Tost
‘Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines–not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.’
‘Pass the Buck. It’s the secret of life. You can’t fight every battle and dry every tear. Whenever you’re dealing with something that you don’t really care about, pass the buck.’
Anton Chekhov
‘I am distracted; I am weary to the bottom of my soul; sorrow lies heavy on my heart; and yet I am expected to sit down and write! And this is called “living”!’
-excerpt from “Hush”, Selected Stories
I am writing a first draft of a short story. Early drafts often feel masochistic and I want to run away, but alas, I know I would only find other, less satisfying ways to torture myself. I know a few! Thus, I continue and know I will be rewarded with those indescribable glimmers of glee a writer is rewarded with through process.
Favourite Bukowski Quotes
“Do you hate people?”
“I don’t hate them…I just feel better when they’re not around.”
-Barfly
“An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”
“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
Robertson Davies
Excerpts from World of Wonders:
“Also he is not inhibited by education, which is the great modern destoyer of truth and originality. Magnus knows no history. Have you ever seen him read a book? He really thinks that whatever has happened to him is unique. It is an enviable characteristic.”
“They’re all so highy eduacted, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there’s a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.”
Cormac McCarthy
Passages from his novel Suttree.
“The big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound.”
“By now the mother had come from the porch. She was dressed in black and closed upon them soundless as a plague, her bitter twisted face looming, axemark for a mouth and eyes crazed with hatred. She tried to speak but only a half strangled scream came out. The girl was thrown aside and this demented harridan was at him clawing, kicking, and gurgling with rage.”
“He saw small figurines composed of dust and light turn in the broken end of a bottle, spidersized marionettes in some minute ballet there in the purple glass so lightly strung with strands of cobweb floss.”