Jess Walter Quotes

Art can't be taught; passion can't be taught; discipline can't be taught; but craft can be taught. And writing is both an art and a craft.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

When I first seriously decided to become a cartoonist would have been '99/2000, right before 9/11. I've been writing and illustrating stories in the world post-9/11 since then, watching the world change around me.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

The writing process isn't something I'm in love with. I'm an illustrator who writes.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well.

When I submitted samples, I had only written stories to give myself something to draw. I was told, "The art is good, but not quite professional yet. But, I like the writing." I've been a writer for almost a half a century. It's very cool.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.