Daniel Woodrell Quotes

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

The mind can make substance, and people planets of its own with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.

With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one's reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.

I don't write with any audience in mind. I just write. I take a chance on the audience. That's what I did originally, and I think it's worked--in the sense that I find there is an audience.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.

A writer needs certain conditions in which to work and create art. She needs a piece of time; a peace of mind; a quiet place; and a private life.

I'd never assume an audience was anything but totally receptive and perfect. Seriously, it seems to me that's the only circumstance you can work under. Otherwise, speaking for myself, you may as well be in the advertising business.

With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way... Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

As soon as your mind knows that it's on and it's supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn't or it produces things that are very predictable. And that's why I say I'm not interested in writing something that I thought about. I'm interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

You don't get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can't.

First one works alone through the mind, then before the public through experience.

you don't need talent to be an artist. 'Artist' is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist, anybody can communicate if they are desperate enough.

Dada is a state of mind.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.