Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Seven Quotations in Support of an Argument


The essence of drawing is the line exploring space. - Andy Goldsworthy

For me, writing starts with a line, or some imagination, or some notion, and I just go with it as far as I can. You set yourself afloat on the language. - Thomas Lynch

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs  and developing our wings on the way down. — Kurt Vonnegut

Write from what you know into what you don't know. - Grace Paley

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. ...  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

The difference between any genre or entertainment writing and art is
that the entertainment writer knows before the first word is written
what effect it will have on the audience or what ideas or thoughts the
audience will take from it. In science fiction, there's a vision of
society, a political implication, a sociological implication; they
create a work to make a political or philosophical point, and/or they
write to produce an effect of escapism, to take the reader away. Either
way, there is a preconceived end effect or message, and the object is
constructed to achieve it. That is the entertainment writer's process. 
The literary artist works from the other end. She does not know, before
the work begins, what it is she sees about the world. She has in her
unconscious, in her dreamspace, an inchoate sense of order behind the
apparent chaos of life, and she must create this object in order to
understand what that order is. It's as much an act of exploration as it
is an act of expression.
- Robert Olen Butler

If I look back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all...
    - Paul Simon

2 comments:

Holly Pappas said...

Thanks for the handy list, Bruce! I've sent my FYC students here to reflect on what they've been taught and what they believe about writing.

Bruce Schauble said...

Thanks. Holly. If you or the students are interested in seeing the implied argument developed at greater length, you could look at my April 17 post or at the "Essaying the Essay" link in sidebar entitle "Elaborations."