I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (28 page)

 

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine
with a lamp on your forehead,
a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything,
whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion,
whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

BLAISE CENDRARS

Anaïs Nin agreed: “To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.” And James Baldwin put it this way: “The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

 

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

JEAN COCTEAU

Authors are sometimes like tomcats:
they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.

MALCOLM COWLEY

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

QUENTIN CRISP

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace
and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,”
and then he passes the hat.

ROBERTSON DAVIES

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity,
and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen
by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.

ROBERTSON DAVIES

The author who speaks about his own books is almost
as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

Employing a similar metaphor, Alex Haley of
Roots
fame wrote: “I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.”

 

Writing is like driving at night in the fog.
You can only see as far as your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. DOCTOROW

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. DOCTOROW

Is writing a disease, or a cure? Graham Greene wrote, “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness…which is inherent in a human situation.”

 

It is with publishers as with wives: one always wants somebody else's.

NORMAN DOUGLAS

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

Cut out all those exclamation marks.
An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

This is the most famous simile on the subject of exclamation marks, but it's not the only one. In a 1976
Punch
article, Miles Kingston wrote, “So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience.”

 

It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into
the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I am irritated by my writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true,
but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sounds he hears within.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

This is from an 1845 letter Flaubert wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet. In another letter to her, he wrote: “I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.”

 

Word carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry:
you must join your sentences smoothly.

ANATOLE FRANCE

The most technologically efficient machine
that man has ever invented is the book.

NORTHROP FRYE

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

ROBERT GRAVES

Graves, a celebrated poet, wrote novels and non-fiction works to finance the publication of his poetry, an arrangement he expresses so exquisitely here.

 

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history,
on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

PHILIP GUEDALLA

Guedalla, an English barrister who gave up a legal career in 1913 to pursue his interest in history and biography, went on to write more than thirty books. He also wrote: “Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be.”

 

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I started out very quietly and I beat Mr. Turgenev.
Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant.
I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal,
and I think I had the edge in the last one.
But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy
unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

This well-known boxing analogy appeared in a 1950
New Yorker
profile that Lillian Ross did on Hemingway. The comment was not well received by critics, who viewed it as grandiose. In the interview, Hemingway also used a few baseball metaphors. He said, “I learned my knuckle-ball” from Baudelaire and he added that Flaubert “always threw them perfectly straight, hard, high, and inside.” He also compared a writer to a starting baseball pitcher, saying a novelist “has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”

 

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom;
some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

Writing a novel, like making chicken soup or making love,
is an idiosyncratic occupation; probably no two people do it the same way.

SUSAN ISAACS

Footnotes—little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.

WILLIAM JAMES

This may be the best thing ever written about footnotes; but a serious rival comes from Nöel Coward: “Having to read a footnote resembles
having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”

 

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

JOHN KEATS

Liking a writer and then meeting the writer
is like liking goose liver and then meeting the goose.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

I'm like a big old hen.
I can't cluck too long about the egg I've just laid
because I've got five more inside me pushing to get out.

LOUIS L'AMOUR

L'Amour also wrote, “A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.”

 

Magazines all too frequently lead to books
and should be regarded as the heavy petting of literature.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

NORMAN MAILER

The writer Walker Percy might have been thinking about Mailer's observation when he wrote: “Somebody compared novel-writing to having a baby, but for me it is the conception which is painful and the delivery which is easy.”

 

In literature as in love we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

You expect far too much of a first sentence.
Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast:
what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb
and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

LARRY MCMURTRY

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved
and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

H.L. MENCKEN

Mencken realized that not all authors viewed the process of writing in this way. He once wrote, “The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.”

 

The structure of a play is always
the story of how the birds came home to roost.

ARTHUR MILLER

The more familiar metaphor is
chickens coming home to roost
, but it means the same thing—our deeds and choices come back to haunt us, like chickens returning to the henhouse each night. The idea was first expressed in 1810 by English poet Robert Southey: “Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.” It's also what Robert Louis Stevenson had in mind in his famous “banquet of consequences” line, which we examined earlier.

 

Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle,
like a long bout of some painful illness.
One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven
by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

GEORGE ORWELL

True ease in writing comes from Art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

ALEXANDER POPE

Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

WILLIAM SHENSTONE

Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter,
open up a vein, and bleed it out drop by drop.

WALTER “RED” SMITH

This is the best known of the analogies that view writing as a kind of blood-letting. The first articulation of the idea came from Sydney Smith, who said of the nineteenth-century English politician Henry Fox: “Fox wrote drop by drop.” A popular variation on the theme comes from the American screenwriter Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

 

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country.
And for that reason, no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway.
Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies,
at others the churned-up mud of the road.

STENDHAL

Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.

LAURENCE STERNE

Authors are actors, books are theaters.

WALLACE STEVENS

Along the same lines, Rod Serling wrote, “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”

 

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Write while the heat is in you.
The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts
uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.
He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

A sentence should read as if its author,
had he held a plough instead of a pen,
could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

A writer judging his own work is like a deceived husband—
he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.

ROBERT TRAVER

Robert Traver is the pen name of John D. Voelker, a Michigan lawyer who was a prosecuting attorney before becoming a Michigan Supreme Court Justice. He wrote many books reflecting his two passions—the law and flyfishing—but is best remembered for the 1958 book
Anatomy of a Murder
.

 

Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom
and I will show you the makings of a dramatist.

KENNETH TYNAN

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water;
but everybody likes water.

MARK TWAIN

Twain wrote this in an 1887 letter to a friend, but the idea first occurred to him two years earlier. An 1885 journal entry, written exactly this way, went as follows: “My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”

 

The instruction we find in books is like fire.
We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home,
communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

VOLTAIRE

It is with books as with men;
a very small number play a great part; the rest are lost in the multitude.

VOLTAIRE

On the books that have played a great part, the American poet and writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich observed: “Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.”

 

I can never understand how two men can write a book together;
to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

EVELYN WAUGH

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—
he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in.
Delay is instinctive with him.
He waits for the surge…that will carry him along.