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Grows Quotes

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“Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.”

“Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.”

“You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.”

“I write in a hurry, because the little one, who has been sleeping a long time, begins to call for me. Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment.”

“Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction.”

“Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.”

“Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself, might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired; but when once he begins to contrive how his sentiments may be received, not with most ease to his reader, but with most advantage to himself, he then transfers his consideration from words to sounds, from sentences to periods, and, as he grows more elegant, becomes less intelligible.”

“a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.”

“Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course - arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.”

“I pretty much started out writing full time. I was an at-home mom and when my youngest entered kindergarten, I started writing. I was 35, and before that I really hadn't written at all. Which means, I guess, that a) it's never too late to start a writing career (or any career you really want) and b) it's OK to get to your mid-30s and still not know what you want to be when you grow up.”

“You honor your writing space by recovering, if you are an addict. You honor your writing space by becoming an anxiety expert, a real pro at mindfulness and personal calming. You honor your writing space by affirming that you matter, that your writing life matters, and that your current writing project matters. You honor your writing space by entering it with this mantra: “I am ready to work.” You enter, grow quiet, and vanish into your writing.”