Pascal I revel in the prospect of being able to torture a phrase once more. Most people won t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else. Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account. The illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true.
Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things. To hold a pen is to be at war. The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. A writer s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. Sloan Wilson Back to list of topics .