Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don’t do base-running drills. You can do these on your own time.

—Tobias Wolff

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

My method back then was very much a fiction writer’s approach to journalism. I began to think of the way you world start a short story and begin with a character, and you hold that pen in your hand, and push it along, and wait to see what will develop. I had this theory that I would sort of put myself out there, and it was as if I was the pen, letting my own intuitions and circumstances guide me.

—Francisco Goldman

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

The narrator of my nonfiction pieces is not the same person I am—she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say that I usually do.

—Janet Malcolm

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself—though, thank god I had never committed them to paper—I think are nonsense… You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn’t hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don’t believe in that at all anymore.

—Jamaica Kincaid

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paagraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer.

—Ian McEwan

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

I’ve never thought of beauty and truth as equivalent in any way. Some truths are ugly, sometimes beautiful, very often ambiguous and invisible. It’s that ambiguous and invisible realm I’m always reaching for in my writing.

Because when we retrieve a memory, we don’t retrieve the original but rather our last retrieval of that memory: we don’t walk around with original, pure imprints of our past. We edit them through the present. Neuroscientists call this reconsolidation. Freud called it nachträglichkeit.

Reading is the avenue to writing, and after a while, the sheer bulk of influences begins to eliminate the question of influence. Even when my memory is spotty for a particular work I loved, I think it lives inside me in some form. Books we respond to become us. They don’t remain intact, of course, or unedited in our recollection, but nobody really writes alone.

—Siri Hustvedt

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

What the novelist needs is not diverse opinions but a personal system of storytelling upon which his opinions can take a firm stand.

Women often act as mediums in my novels. They guide the protagonist to “places out of the ordinary,” and they make the story move.

What I want to do is write about lots of different characters in lots of different situations, and that way to create stories with greater breadth. New character types are beginning to appear in my books because I know now how to write them.

—Haruki Murakami

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent.

—George Saunders

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

In my own case, I certainly don’t walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door… I don’t burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.

You try to surprise yourself. You want to go against what you’ve done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project. Once you fall into habits, I think, you’re dead as an artist.

… the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. You as a reader enter the consciousness of another person, and in doing so, I think you discover something about your humanity, and it makes you feel more alive.

—Paul Auster

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

People often expect—I don’t know why—that two writers living together must generate some hostility or friction. With us, it was the contrary; each understood what the other was up against; the need for seclusion, silence, and a need also for stimulus, sociability, sharing. Even the need for interruption, but only if one could dictate the interruption on one’s own capricious terms… Each of us understood that behind the closed door, on some particular day, the other might be going mad over a recalcitrant paragraph.

[I work purely from] Memory. I think I have a fairly remarkable memory. I’ve always reserved what gave me pleasure, what interested me. Aldo, what had been poignant: the nature of sadness, the private anguish of tragedy, regret. I am full of lines of poetry, impressions, experiences, words. If remembrance were all pleasure, that would be too easy. I keep hold of matters that can’t be solved—why something went wrong, who was at fault, or how the difficulty was shared. These remain with me—no doubt as they do with many people. I see, too, looking back from that early youth I kept a reserve of what was beautiful, pleasurable, even sad, as a capital to draw on, and perhaps as evidence of a better self that I could consistently summon before the world.

I wrote a number of short stories rather quickly at the time. And then suddenly I was writing a novel. I said to [William] Maxwell [chief fiction editor of the New Yorker], “It’s markedly different from my previous work. Perhaps I’ve grown up as a writer, or the material’s different, but I begin to wonder whether some of my stories will eventually seem quite juvenile to me.”

Maxwell said, “I wouldn’t count on that. Rather, you’ll look back on them as things absolutely fresh and spontaneous, with a kind of innocence that you will only rarely capture in later work. Your later work may be more mature, riper, more imaginative, more inventive perhaps. But there will always be the freshness about the first work.”

—Shirley Hazzard

Taken from The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers