What I'm Thinking About

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

For people share through all creation
One weakness of the American nation;
The books they prize upon their shelves
Say the horridest things about themselves.
Is this fact hidden from the poet,
Or does the unscrupulous scribbler know it?

― Ogden Nash

How are you to make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and people expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power?

― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety