Essayful
@Essayful
Followers
8,282
Following
0
Media
466
Statuses
992
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Ohio
• 377158 Tweets
Springfield
• 269130 Tweets
Haitians
• 221061 Tweets
#JACKANDJOKEREP1
• 190910 Tweets
EP1 U STEAL MY HEART
• 160650 Tweets
#AppleEvent
• 62420 Tweets
Draghi
• 33047 Tweets
Namaz
• 32198 Tweets
PIERROT
• 16677 Tweets
海ちゃん
• 14264 Tweets
Princess of Wales
• 13188 Tweets
Culiacán
• 12502 Tweets
LISA SOLO 3RD ANNIV
• 11984 Tweets
Big Lots
• 11834 Tweets
Dreamcast
• 10924 Tweets
対象作品
• 10915 Tweets
Cowboy Carter
• 10470 Tweets
$INSDR
• 10218 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
John Updike... Maybe the best perspective on artistic ambition I’ve ever read
16
163
1K
Henry Miller...
There are great works of literature within you, if you’d only stop and listen
When a writer says something you knew but had never articulated before, something you never knew you knew, honestly nothing quite like it
44
358
2K
13
753
5K
Ernest Hemingway,
in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
May 10, 1934
9
311
2K
Jorge Luis Borges on the depth and beauty of the English language (1977)
“To live down something, to live up to something. You can’t say those things in Spanish; they can’t be said.”
19
231
894
“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day.
Just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does.”
— John Steinbeck, 1962
8
161
786
Cormac McCarthy on the unconscious, language, mathematics, and “the nightshift” (2007)
“Poincaré was stuck on a problem one time... And as he was getting on the trolley car in this distant city, the equation suddenly appeared in the air over the head of the conductor.”
21
136
751
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
— C. S. Lewis, 1916
4
145
680
Vladimir Nabokov’s Brutally Honest Opinions on 63 of the “Greatest” Writers to Ever Write (1973)
Auden, W. H. Not familiar with his poetry, but his translations contain deplorable blunders.
Austen, Jane. Great.
Balzac, Honoré de. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes.
71
136
648
“If they won’t write the kind of books we like to read, we shall have to write them ourselves.”
— C. S. Lewis, in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien
10
155
634
In 2015, Norm Macdonald tweeted out of a story about a particularly strange weekend, when—out of the blue—the young comedian received an invitation to Bob Dylan's home
Dylan wanted to talk about one thing—writing
The story was quickly deleted, but the screenshots survived
1/15
18
140
535
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit.”
— Ernest Hemingway,
in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald,
May 28, 1934
4
71
541
“Sit in a room and read—and read and read.
And read the right books by the right people.
Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”
— Joseph Campbell, 1988
12
89
492
“A good sentence in English has a structure that begins with the second most important element, moves to the least important element, and ends with the strongest element.
The pattern is 2-3-1.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, 1973
10
66
453
Camille Paglia on her writing process (2015)
“My system of composition has four parts.
There’s a long period of very enjoyable rumination, where I assemble information and jot ideas and phrases at random on legal-size notepaper—pages upon pages...
Then, as the deadline
6
47
407
Advice to a Young Writer by C. S. Lewis (1959)
“It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.
1. Turn off the radio.
2. Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.
3. Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You
6
88
380
David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
21
60
320
Marshall McLuhan on the essence of communication (1971)
“Most people never communicate in their entire lives. They think what they say is communication. Communication is the effect of what you say.”
7
96
291
“Our time is limited. We read against the clock.
We read, ultimately, in the shadow of mortality—and I think it does matter immensely what and how we read.”
— Harold Bloom, 2000
2
60
269
“I was doing the dull work of correcting exam papers when I came upon a blank page someone had turned in. I turned it over and wrote on the back, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’
I’d never even heard of a hobbit or used the word before.”
— J. R. R. Tolkien, 1968
4
38
253
Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, William Faulkner...
Pages from the notebooks of literary giants.
1/10 Fyodor Dostoevsky
10
53
228
“I myself am too busy to care about the public. I have no time to wonder who is reading me. I don’t care about John Doe’s opinion on my or anyone else’s work. Mine is the standard which has to be met.”
— William Faulkner, 1956
2
35
223
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language,
And next year’s words await another voice.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
2
61
217
Martin Amis’s 15 Rules For Writers (2014)
1. Write in longhand: when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important because usually your first instinct is the right one.
2. Minimum
8
48
220
“Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract, and very beautiful.”
― David Lynch, 2006
5
41
210
“The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our life today—we put it off till our deathbed.
Never forget: this very moment, we can change our lives.
This second, we can sit down and do our work.”
— Steven Pressfield, 2002
6
30
210
“Allow me to give you some advice from the heart: don’t give up art, and even give yourself over to it even more.
To live alone may well make your life too drear for endurance.
There is but one cure, one refuge, for that woe: art, creative activity.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
4
61
197
“A writer must think that all things have been given to us for a purpose.
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, 1983
2
40
202
“If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.”
— Leo Tolstoy in a letter to Nikolay Strakhov, 26 September 1880
6
35
192
Camille Paglia on subconscious processes and the architecture of prose (2015)
“My attention to the individual sentence is unusual. A sentence has its own life. A sentence is almost like a person, and should be able to live on its own.”
7
28
179
In November of 1849, the Tsar of Russia rounded up the members of the Petrashevsky Circle—including Fyodor Dostoevsky—and sentenced them all to death.
That December, Dostoevsky and three of his co-conspirators were led out blindfolded into the cold morning sun and shackled to
6
47
179
Bob Dylan on the otherworldliness of creativity (2004)
“I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written.”
It is reminiscent of how mathematical discoveries tend to speak themselves—not to the experienced—but to the young.
8
36
167
“Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”
— Hermann Hesse, 1922
3
43
175
“I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that platonic entity known as ‘The Masses.’
Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in.
I write for myself and my friends—I write to ease the passing of time.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, 1975
4
32
173
JFK on the civilizational importance of literature and art (1962)
1
57
155
“I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, 1989
2
23
153
Ray Bradbury on violence, art, and civilization (1968)
“We save up a tension for tears, so I as a writer come along and try to help you to cry.
Nietzsche puts it beautifully: we have art, that we do not die of reality.”
4
36
144
In his 1823 essay “How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days,” Ludwig Börne invented the concept of automatic or freewriting. It was the after reading Börne’s essay that Sigmund Freud—the godfather of psychoanalysis—began to formulate his theory of “the unconscious.”
“To do
6
27
147
“The intellect is a great danger to creativity.”
— Ray Bradbury, 1974
3
44
130
Ray Bradbury on the need to write now—right now (1968)
“The man who cannot be violent through exercise, through sports, through acting out his violence on paper or painting or acting on a stage, is a sick man.”
2
32
128
“Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours.
That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.”
— David Foster Wallace, 1987
0
18
127
“A person is a fool to become a writer.
His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.”
— Roald Dahl, 1984
3
22
123
J. R. R. Tolkien on death as the lifeblood of storytelling (1968)
1
27
121
“Write as if you were dying.
At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.
What would you write if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
— Annie Dillard, 1989
3
14
126
Jorge Luis Borges on writing simply and from the soul (1976)
“It is a mistake to write with a dictionary. The baroque style has a sin, which is the sin of vanity.
Your phrase is better.”
6
28
120
“I’ve felt reluctant to write some days, whole weeks.
But later, coming back, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say ‘Well, now it’s writing time.’
There’s no difference on paper between the two.”
— Frank Herbert, 1990
1
18
122
“I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about?
My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.”
— Cormac McCarthy, 2009
6
21
121
Six Rules for the Aspiring Writer by John Steinbeck (1975)
“1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as
3
22
119
David Bowie’s advice to the young artist (2002)
“Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel you’re feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
2
15
119
A few months ago, I compiled a list of the 200 greatest books for the aspiring writer or polymath
Now, I’ve done the same for 200 of the greatest essays on writing, art, and creativity—for your viewing pleasure in thread-form below
20 genres. Find yours
6
24
117
Orson Welles on ignorance as artistic freedom (1960)
Welles wrote Citizen Kane aged 24, negotiated his way into directing and starring in the film aged 25 (with no prior directing or acting experience), before then winning an Academy Award the following year.
5
25
113
“My hands do the thinking. It is not a conscious process.”
— Cormac McCarthy, 1973
3
19
112
“Who said anything about watching films? I tell the Rogues to read, read, read, read, read.
Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it.
Our civilisation is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale
3
29
111
He dictated while pacing, always pacing.
After working late into the night, making notes, Dostoevsky would scrap it all while dictating, pacing—a feat made possible by “one of Russia’s first stenographers,” Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina.
In other words, Dostoevsky’s fiction was
6
15
111
Italo Calvino struggled to write for years with zero success, then...
“I began doing what came most naturally to me. That is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected
1
22
107
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
— Ernest Hemingway, 1953
4
14
107
“I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1846
4
17
105
WRITERS WHO PUBLISHED THEIR FIRST NOVELS LATE IN LIFE; or, IT’S NOT LATE, IT’S BARELY EARLY
Toni Morrison, with The Bluest Eye, was 40.
William S. Burroughs, with Junky, was 40.
George Eliot, with Adam Bede, was 40.
Mark Twain, with The Innocents Abroad, was 41.
Bram Stoker,
6
19
105
“Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books—and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.”
— Gore Vidal
8
25
104
Werner Herzog on the Ever-Swaying Tightrope between Money and Art (2002)
“The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and for others to decide your fate.
If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar
3
16
103
Write More: The Lesser of Three Evils Method
“To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting,” wrote Edmund Burke. Why should writing be any different?
You want to write more. Well, I want to read more, so I want you to write more. In fact, I want you to want to
4
20
102
Werner Herzog on reading (2021)
“It gives you a sense of storytelling. It gives you a sense of dialogue. It gives you a separate interior life.”
3
29
101
Norm Macdonald reading War and Peace.
Upside down, of course.
He became obsessed with Russian literature from the age of fourteen: an obsession that would lay the foundations for his famously absurdist and (seemingly) stream-of-consciousness joke structure.
The only caveat to
3
14
103
“I have the words already.
What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.
There is an order in every way appropriate.”
— James Joyce, 1919
0
7
102
“Allow me to give you some advice from the heart.
There is a single refuge, a single medicine: art and creative work.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, 11 April 1880
1
19
99
Robert Anton Wilson on how fiction can break down the doors of reality (1995)
“My books are full of neologisms and odd uses of language just to break through the habits of perception, which are conditioned by using ordinary English.”
5
24
98
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!
Then write.
If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
— William Faulkner, 1956
1
23
97
When writing, Joseph Conrad’s wife would lock him in his study, forcing concentration.
One afternoon, emerging for lunch, his wife asked what he had done. “I took out a comma,” he informed her.
At dinner that evening, she asked him again. “I put back the comma,” Conrad replied.
6
12
96
From Lewis Carroll’s hand-written first draft of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (1864)
7
23
94
“Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested.”
— Francis Bacon, 1625
3
25
94
“I feel absolutely impotent every time I sit down to write.
Writing is hard work. It’s the hardest work in the world. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
The only reason they pay good money is there aren’t many people who can do it.”
Ernest Hemingway, 1934
7
13
93
Roald Dahl on his writing process and why good children’s books are more difficult than novels (1982)
“I always use six pencils, and they always have to be sharpened before I start.
The pencil doesn’t very often touch the paper. It's looking, and musing, and correcting.”
4
20
91
At 29, Roald Dahl was selling oil in Tanzania, navigating lions on a weekly basis.
Then, WW2 struck.
In the next three years, Dahl would become a decorated fighter pilot, until a crash retired him to writing propaganda for the Allied cause.
Fiction had never crossed his mind.
1
16
89
Camille Paglia on the digital destruction of style (2015)
“Never would I write into the machine.”
11
11
86
Neil Gaiman on the origin of ideas (2012)
“Desperation. Deadlines. A lot of times ideas will turn up while you’re doing something else—and most of all, I think, ideas come from confluence; from two things flowing together.”
2
19
88
Walter Benjamin’s 13 Techniques for Writers (1928)
Nulla dies sine linea, ‘no day without a line.’
7
18
88
“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line—a Distant Early Warning system—that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
— Marshall McLuhan, 1964
1
22
90
“To be good, many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm, and that’s a lie.
That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare
2
27
88
“You know Hunter 𝑡𝑦𝑝𝑒𝑑 The Great Gatsby?
He’d look at each page Fitzgerald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once.
He wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece.”
— Johnny Depp on Hunter S. Thompson, 2011
5
6
83
“Ideology wants to convince you that its truth is absolute. A novel shows you that everything is relative.
The more ideological our century becomes, the more anachronistic is the novel. But the more anachronistic it gets, the more we need it.”
— Milan Kundera, 1929-2023 | RIP
0
23
84
“I go hours before I’m able to write a word.
I make tea—I mean, I used to make tea all day long. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened.
That’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started.”
— John McPhee, 2010
5
9
84
Francis Ford Coppola on his unorthodox, novelistic approach to The Godfather (c. 1971)
“When you first read the novel, put good notes in it, right on the book, write down every sensation.
In the case of The Godfather, I did that. Although I had a screenplay, I never used it.”
0
19
81
‘’Instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified.
Don’t say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description.”
― C. S. Lewis, 1956
1
16
81