Quotation Saturday

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.

~Ray Bradbury

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions"
~ Italo Calvino

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear"
~Italo Calvino

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

~E.L. Doctorow

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

~Benjamin Franklin

My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.

~Helen Hayes

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.

~Stephen King

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977