Advice to Writers A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights

On agents:"Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist." --Russell Banks On characters:"The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly." --Isaac Bashevis Singer On colleagues:"Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude -- and now and the a piece of red meat." --Henry Miller On critics and criticism:"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at only one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends." --Samuel Johnson On dialogue:"Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore." --Edith Wharton On discouragement:"Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." --Red Smith On drink:"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." --F. Scott Fitzgerald On editors and editing:"Bow down before them. They know what they are doing." --Quentin Crisp On grammar and usage:"Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical." --W. Somerset MaughamWinokur, Jon is the author of 'Advice to Writers A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights' with ISBN 9780679763413 and ISBN 0679763414.