“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
Jackie Collins (1937–2015) British-American novelist and writer
"Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15195588 All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)
“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
Jackie Collins (1937–2015) British-American novelist and writer
Ridley Scott (1937) English film director and film producer
On the relentlessly brutal tone of the works of screenwriter Cormac McCarthy
New York Times interview (2013)
Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer
On her views of writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)
Patrick McHale (artist) (1983) writer, storyboard artist, animator, filmmaker
which makes it more interesting for adults <br class="br"> Interview with Pat McHale (Adventure Time, Over the Garden Wall writer) https://crackplot.com/2015/06/13/interview-with-pat-mchale-adventure-time-over-the-garden-wall-writer/ (June 13, 2015)
Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer
On her obsession with writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist
Interview in The Paris Review, Issue #13 http://books.google.com/books?id=iZt6sBaHemQC&q=&quot;all+those+writers+who+write+about+their+childhood+gentle+god+if+i+wrote+about+mine+you+wouldn't+sit+in+the+same+room+with+me&quot;&pg=PA8#v=onepage (Summer 1956)
Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters
Foreword
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.