Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Art. Its definitions are legion, its meanings multitudinous, its importance often debated. But amid the many contradictory definitions of art, one has always stood the test of time, from the Upanishads in the East, to Michelangelo in the West: art is the perception and depiction of the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the spiritual.

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.

It's hard to be an artist. It's hard to be anything. It's hard to be.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Most writers, I'm afraid, live very boring lives sitting in front of a screen. However, having said that: every writer puts a bit of themselves into the characters to bring them alive.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.