Start your day with a dose of literature—sign up for our poetry newsletter to receive an archival poem to your inbox every morning.

“Writing is difficult; it is like jumping into the void.” —Nathalie Sarraute

“Finding time is the main problem. That’s why I want to retire—so I can really get to work.” —Samuel R. Delany

“I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn’t get the murder to take place!” —Mary McCarthy

“I can’t start anything until I have a first sentence. That doesn’t mean I’ll keep it, but until I have a sentence that I think is the right one, I can’t write another word.” —Percival Everett

“If one is condemned to write, one writes.” —Julio Cortazar www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2...

“When you spend time with your friends, what do you talk about? Those things which made an impression on you that day, that week … I write stories the same way.”—Naguib Mahfouz www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2...

“I used to be ‘allergic’ to humor because I thought that serious literature never smiled.” —Mario Vargas Llosa theparisreview.org/interviews/2...

“I don’t think of work as evolving. I think of writers as sitting down and starting from scratch every time—at least that is how it is for me.” —Lorrie Moore www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5...

“Why shouldn’t literature provoke? It always has.” —Salman Rushdie

“Oh, I don’t mind failure. I can’t grow and find that thing I’m looking for if I don’t miss a few jump shots. It’s not that I dislike what I’ve made, but I accept that it’s not where I want to be.”—Percival Everett

“When it’s finally in print, you’re delivered—you don’t ever have to look at it again. It’s too late to worry about its failings. I’ll have to apply any lessons this book has taught me toward writing the next one.” —Eudora Welty

“However fallible human memory is, that’s mostly what we have. And the flukes and flaws of spoken memory often constitute its poetry.” —Allan Gurganus

“My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity.” —Chinua Achebe

“That was, and still is, a common accusation, ‘You are not showing India in a proper light’—as though the purpose of all art is direct or indirect publicity for the ministry of tourism.” —Arundhati Roy

“Writing fiction is for me a fraught business … You have to sit down every day and make it up.” —Joan Didion

“You need to write about the life you’ve lived. It can’t all be aspirational. It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.” —Edward Hirsch

Each week, we unlock from our archive stories, poems, and interviews for our readers. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning.

“I would feel more at home if I wrote in Chinese, that’s clear. But I’ve been doing it in English for so long I can’t switch. Life’s just too short for that.” —Ha Jin

“in a world the orange sun resets a recessed darkness” From “1981” by Asiya Wadud in our new Spring issue.

“Anything, anything can change a writer, if one is open to it.” —Suzan-Lori Parks

“Ishmael Reed came out of his office and into the hallway. I was bedazzled. He said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m John Keene. I applied to your poetry and fiction classes.’ He said, ‘Uh, you’re a poet.’ I could have fainted.” —John Keene

“If I have a deadline, I can meet it, but I can’t then immediately go on writing again. And do I ever get a piece in ahead of the deadline? I don’t think I’ve ever done that.” —Margo Jefferson

“my goodness! how terrified I was! it was all so strange and frightening that I wept for quite some time” From “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” by Nakahara Chuya in our new Spring issue.

“Literature is pleasure and knowledge, like sex. It’s useful only so long as one doesn’t set out to make it useful.” —Javier Cercas

“There was no mystery: even before I learned to read and write I knew it was in order to write poetry.”—Yves Bonnefoy

“Many of my memories of writing that book are of being physically frightened, being alone in the middle of nowhere and feeling quite physically frightened but just having to get on with it.” —Rachel Cusk

“He wanted to keep his back to those buildings for a long time, to not turn around, to not go home, to not lie down between the locomotive factory, the cable factory, and the oil refinery.” From “The Welder” by Ingeborg Bachmann in our new Spring issue.

“I really, really hate writing that pulls its punches, stalls out in exposition that we don’t need.” —Maggie Nelson

“Duality to me is the sign of the master coming. I would love to have a life that didn’t have all that in it, that was just, A free spirit arrived and left. Someone who almost doesn’t have a footprint.” —Fanny Howe

“It will always matter a great deal that Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction. It just matters to the world. You know what I’m trying to say, I hope.” From our Art of Nonfiction interview with Darryl Pinckney.

“Most of the narrators and chief characters in my fiction are versions of myself that never materialized, potential versions of myself.” —Gerald Murnane

“People always ask, ‘Who’s your ideal reader?’ Mine is somebody who reads a few pages and then falls asleep and has a fantastic dream.” —Eliot Weinberger

“Someone asked me, ‘Who do you write for?’ And I stood on that stage, this incredibly green writer, and said, ‘I write for myself.’ There was total silence.” —Jhumpa Lahiri

Start your day with a dose of literature—sign up for our poetry newsletter to receive an archival poem to your inbox every morning.

“I’ve never had that feeling of block, maybe because I spend so much time dreaming things up before I sit down to write. Only when the characters are refined enough in my mind can I put them into words.” —Marie NDiaye

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” —E. B. White buff.ly/4aikmNk

“I think it was during my first marriage that I started to write things down regularly. I didn’t really have anything to say. I just liked writing—­I liked pushing a pen across a page without having to call the result an essay.” —Helen Garner

“I’d run into Leslie Epstein in Brookline, and he’d ask me, ‘Are you writing, Jhumpa?’ And I’d say, ‘I have papers to finish—Foucault is expecting me.’ And he’d say, ‘Don’t forget to be a writer.’” —Jhumpa Lahiri

“The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions.” —William Faulkner buff.ly/3P8LBBu

“The man read and read, moving his lips; now and then his whole body started moving and then the words entered him like spirits, and began to work their mischief.” From “The Welder” by Ingeborg Bachmann in our new Spring issue.

“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals.” —John Steinbeck

“It is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one, then you are better off alone. But there are editors so rare and so important that they are worth searching for, and you always know when you have one.” —Toni Morrison

“If you’re a real writer, you write no matter what.” —Irwin Shaw

Each week, we unlock from our archive stories, poems, and interviews for our readers. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning.

“All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery.” —Angus Wilson

“The scary thing is when you write yourself into jeopardy, when you make it a little dangerous.” —Sam Lipsyte

“The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“I don’t think you can ever know too much about craft.” —August Wilson

“The first day of the new year brings new additions to the public domain. In most cases release depends not on the year of publication but on the death of the author.” From “Public Domain” by Rachel Lapides in our new Spring issue.