Customer Reviews

The Quotable Writer

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Lamar Underwood has assembled a collection of brief quotes from writers about writing. The book's eleven chapters cover topics ranging from the writing process to critics, fans and publishers. These are all very short quotes--one or two per page with plenty of white space.

Ten of my favorite shorts:

1. Elmore Leonard - "Try to leave out the parts that readers skip."

2. Flannery O'Connor - "There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald - "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

4. E. L. Doctorow - "You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

5. Adlai Stevenson - "An editor separates the wheat from the chaff--and prints the chaff."

6. Red Smith - "Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein."

7. William Faulkner - "Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's first-rate. If not, there's not anything can help it much."

8. W.H. Auden - "One cannot review a bad book without showing off."

9. Russell Lynes - "Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it."

10. Gertrude Stein - "Remarks are not literature."

There are a number of good, short, thought-provoking quotes. Did I mention they are short? My personal taste runs more to longer discussions of a writer's perspective, like Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Happily, the book supports this preference with a thorough Works Cited section that points to author autobiographies and other book-depth examinations of writing. Nice save!