On agents: "Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist." --
Russell BanksOn characters: "The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly." --
Isaac Bashevis SingerOn colleagues: "Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude -- and now and the a piece of red meat." --
Henry MillerOn critics and criticism: "It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at only one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends." --
Samuel JohnsonOn dialogue: "Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore." --
Edith WhartonOn discouragement: "Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." --
Red SmithOn drink: "First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." --
F. Scott FitzgeraldOn editors and editing: "Bow down before them. They know what they are doing." --
Quentin CrispOn grammar and usage: "Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical." --
W. Somerset Maugham
Copyright © 2000 by Jon Winokur. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
