Long ago, it was common to keep a copybook – a blank book meant only for copying out bits of wisdom or beauty gleaned from writing.  These are now kept digitally, and often shared with the world as soon as gathered.  I kept, for a couple of years, an actual blank book in which I wrote things in my reading that struck me, since in those days I was learning (or attempting to learn) how to be a writer.   I still have that copybook, and I’ll share the quotes having direct (or indirect) application to the arts and crafts of writing. When that little book was full it was a new age, and I recorded them on the computer. Maybe they will be useful to you.  I think they were to me, though it may be that I mostly just admired them, or nodded at how true they seemed. 

 

The first is from Edith Wharton, prolific and hardworking author (The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth) writing at the end of her career, in 1934:

       What is writing a novel like?
           1.  The beginning:  A ride through a spring wood.
           2.  The middle:  The Gobi Desert.
           3.  The End:  A night with a lover.

Then there is Richard Hughes, whose first novel was far and away his best, and stands among the finest novels in English in this century: it was called A High Wind in Jamaica. and was published in 1929 when Hughes was twenty-nine.  This is a remark (technically a remark in the gnomic present addressed to the reader), from that book:

Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all this; but often the only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a card-house, out of a pack of lies.

Walter Benjamin’ s claim is inarguable:

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

Here is one from the journals of John Cheever:

I think that the task of the American writer is not ot describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain, but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball.  This is ceremony.  The umpires in clericals, sifting out the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits.  The sense of moral judgments embodied in migratory vastness.

One last (there will be at least one more series) from Flaubert, who famously did little except to write:

"You must—do you hear me, young man?—you must work harder," Flaubert told Maupassant in 1878. "Too many whores! Too much boating! Too much exercise! Yes, that's right: a civilized man does not require as much locomotion as doctors would have us believe."

More to come, probably.