Rex Stout on character

Rex Stout was prolific--he claimed it took between 35 and 41 days to write a novel, as long as he wasn't drinking. He wrote 33 novels and I won't get into the number of stories. His best-known as the creator of Nero Wolfe--the genius detective with the too too solid flesh.

"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat."

I won't pretend to have read more than about a dozen of his books so far, but these are three of my favorites so far:

The Silent Speaker

The Golden Spiders

Not Quite Dead Enough

Here's a bonus quote:

"There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living cook books and detective stories."

Tom Stoppard on words

 “I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

John Crowley on books

 

“Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.”

--John Crowley

Stephen Millhauser on writing

 

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.      –Steven Millhauser

Edward Albee on reading

 Was Edward Albee the greatest American playwright of the 20th century? Well, there's Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller, of course. But I like danger in the theatr, and there's no one mote dangerous than Albee.

“Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

Favorites:

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A Zoo Story

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

Bonus quote:

“I don’t have ideas. I have people. They meet. Things happen. They are changed. Find out why these people are in your head. Eventually they’ll say: ‘Write me.’”

Arthur Phillips on fiction

 

Arthur Phillips is one of my favorite writers working today. Perhaps his background as a jazz saxophonists or his record as a five-time Jeopardy champion informs his work, since he has six novels under his belt, and no two are alike in genre, style, or subject matter. He's an inspiration to any writer hoping to break out of the single-genre ghetto.

 

"Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?" 

Favorite works

The Egyptologist

Prague

Angelica

James Stephens on books

James Stephens, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce, largely forgotten today, wrote one of my three favorite books, The Crock of Gold -- a tale like no other I've ever read: by turns humorous, philosophical and poetic, whose premise is what happens when the leprechauns of Gort na Cloca Mora exact revenge for having their pot of gold stolen. 

So it seems incumbent upon me to share a couple of quotes from the man.

“He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to ceiling with books. There were volumes of every size, every shape, every colour. There were long, narrow books that held themselves like grenadiers at stiff attention. There were short, fat books that stood solidly like aldermen who were going to make speeches and were ashamed but not frightened. 

There were mediocre books bearing themselves with the carelessness of folk who are never looked at and have consequently no shyness. There were solemn books that seemed to be feeling for their spectacles; and there were tattered, important books that had got dirty because they took snuff, and were tattered because they had been crossed in love and had never married afterwards. There were prim, ancient tomes that were certainly ashamed of their heroines and utterly unable to obtain a divorce from the hussies; and there were lean, rakish volumes that leaned carelessly, or perhaps it was with studied elegance, against their neighbours, murmuring in affected tones, "All heroines are charming to us.

--The Demi-Gods

Jules Feiffer on writing

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

"Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw."

--Jules Feiffer 

Jules left us in January. Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter. Illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth. Winner of the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning. Inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Tom Robbins on writing

 

Tom Robbins, best known as the author of eight remarkable, subversive novels, died this month at the age of 92. Here's Robbins laying down the rules of writing:

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

--Tom Robbins

May he rest in rebelliousness, riotousness, and redemption.

Calvin Trillin on writing

 

"I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if
his confidence is completely shot."

 --Calvin Trillin: journalist, humorist, deadline poet.

Favorite books:

Alice, Let's Eat

Uncivil Liberties

Enough's Enough: and Other Rules of Life

Bonus quote:

“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates

 into hard work.”

As Trillin says: Enough's enough.

Italo Calvino on writing

 

"There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries. "

— Italo Calvino,  October 15, 1923 –  September 19 1985

Italian writer and journalist.

Favorite Works:

The Baron in the Trees

If on a winter's night a traveler

Six Memos for the Next Millenium

Bonus quote:

“Sections in the bookstore:

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
                                      ―from  If on a winter’s night a traveler

Richard Powers on reading

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

                        --Richard Powers

Favorites:

The Overstory

Generosity: an Enhancement

Gain

Plus, a bonus quote:

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

Dylan Thomas on words

"I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy."

-- Dylan Thomas

Favorites:

Collected Poem

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Under Milkwood

And a bonus quote:

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.”

Ray Bradbury on writing

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live. 

--Ray Bradbury

Favorites:

The Martian Chronicles

The October Country

The Illustrated Man

Carlos Labbe on mystery

 

"He'd been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at his desk: he didn't want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery."

--Carlos Labbé

Raymond Chandler on writers

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong."    

                           

--Raymond Chandler

Favorites:

The Big Sleep

The Simple Art of Murder

The long Goodbye

And a bonus quote:

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."

Eudora Welty on characters

“Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

                –Eudora Welty

Favorites:

Losing Battles

The Robber Bridegroom

The Ponder Heart

Plus, a bonus quote:

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Robert Graves on story-tellers

The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers 

 Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, 

Keep probability – some say – in view. 

But my advice to story-tellers is: 

Weigh out no gross of probabilities, 

Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of 

Known instances of virtue, crime or love. 

To forge a picture that will pass for true, 

Do conscientiously what liars do – 

Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid 

The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade: 

Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps 

That may shake down into a world perhaps; 

People this world, by chance created so, 

With random persons whom you do not know – 

The teashop sort, or travellers in a train 

Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again; 

Let the erratic course they steer surprise 

Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes; 

Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) 

Motive and end and moral in the air; 

Nice contradiction between fact and fact 

Will make the whole read human and exact. 

 

                                      —Robert Graves

Favorites:

Collected Poems

The White Goddess

Goodbye to All That

And a bonus quote:

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”

Stephen Dobyns on intuition

 Stephen Dobyns is an American novelist and poet--at least, he's billed as a poet, but think of his poems more as short, exquisitely crafted stories. He also moonlights as a detective novelist.

“Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.”

Favorite books

Cold Dog Soup

The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini

Common Carnage

Bonus Quote

Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.

Dylan Thomas on language

 

"Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work." 

--Dylan Thomas