Quotations: Out of Control

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, X

 

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.  Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell, “Why I Write”

 

The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and   That is why we are so unreasonable over the stories we like, and so ready to bully those who like something else.

it appeals to what is primitive in us.

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 41

 

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.

Leo Rosten

 

In a sense, writers don’t get ideas: ideas get writers.  They happen to us.  If we don’t submit to their power, we lose them; so by trying to control or censor them we make the negative choice of encouraging them to leave us alone. But we can never force ourselves to be truly creative. The best we can do is to teach ourselves receptiveness—and trust that ideas will come.

Stephen R. Donaldson, Afterward to The Real Story