Hawthorne Writer Quotes

she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.

A writer's mind is like a teapot. The words build up in your head until you just gotta let 'em out.

Hone your writing skills as if they were your finest weapons of war. For in the literary arena, your pen will truly be your sword.

When it comes to creating compelling fiction, the devil may be in the details, but it is your imagination that ultimately allows your work to spread its wings and take flight. And fly it must. Only by soaring above the clouds of doubt can one truly achieve a suspension of disbelief

Writer's Block: making authors miserable since the Stone Age.

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.

Reading consists of perusing razor-thin slices of perpetuity, wrenched from the heart of a murdered tree, and infused with the dark blood that swirls within the hidden depths of every writer's soul. It is their combined angst - the author's and the tree's - that we partake of when we immerse ourselves in the pages of a book.

It’s one of the paradoxes of being a writer that, physically, there’s not a huge difference between the debut novelist and the international best-seller: they’re each stuck in a room with a laptop, too many Jaffa Cakes and nobody to talk to. I once worked

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false

Writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for every reader, after an age or two.

front of the desk is Mark Styler, a writer in his early

I thought you’d have known that, you being a TV writer.

Moonlight, in a familiar room . . . is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer.

thought for a moment. A very public threat from a well-known feminist writer. A mysterious message in green paint. An incredibly expensive bottle of wine.

Young Goodman Brown,” The Scarlet Letter, or his 1851 bestseller, The House of the Seven Gables, but Hawthorne proved that territory still radioactive. Guilt and blame have grown up lushly on the scene, attracting writers from Walt Whitman to John Updike. Arthur Miller read the court papers under the spell of McCarthyism. He discovered, as New England itself had, that events must be absorbed before monuments can be raised. The Crucible

Two women, one a writer, the other a publisher, had both come up against the same lawyer. At least one of them had been trashed by him and had threatened to kill him. And now the other one was providing an alibi for her.

Writers like Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, and Nathaniel Hawthorne added uniquely American elements to their horror stories, informed by the early settlers' Puritan faith and fears of indigenous peoples: eerie woods, the devil, and witches. Even today, much of American horror fiction reckons to varying degrees with fears that are tied up in the nation's history, fears of supernatural evil, of the racial other, and of the frightful consequences of the violent past coming home to roost.

I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind. An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position—is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity,—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,—he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death—is, that, finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than any thing else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.

It is the rare young writer who does not fall in love with the idea of becoming famous, and Melville was no exception. When he remarked years later to Hawthorne that no man “who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows,” he was reproving his younger self for having craved it.

The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it.

one shindig to the next. I’ve often wondered how I would have managed if I’d been born with a stammer or chronic shyness. The modern writer has to be able to perform, often to a huge audience. It’s almost like being a stand-up comedian except that the questions never change and you always end up telling the same jokes. Whether it’s crime in Harrogate,

We’ve already agreed that I can’t write about Ahmet or Pranav. So presumably I can’t write about Maureen or Sky either . . . because they’re both women! Or Lucky because he’s a dog! At the end of the day, if I listened to you, I’d only write about myself! A book full of middle-aged white writers describing middle-aged white writers being murdered by middle-aged white writers!

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. […] A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.

(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion." Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying.

Covet. It was a peculiar word. One I tended to associate with long, dull lectures on Hawthorne and other early American writers from the Puritan age. I had to look it up once, as part of an essay I had been forced to write in school. What I found was: to desire wrongfully, inordinately, or without due regard for the rights of others. There were other definitions. More words, different words, although all of them meant the same thing. But it was that first part that had stayed with me: to desire wrongfully.

I feel that I'm lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change. Early American writers, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in modern America. True, we have no great church in America; our national treasures are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that’s above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization. But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

This little epoch of fermentation has three or four drawbacks for the critic—drawbacks, however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn without a noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no great talents. It produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside, as a contemporary but not a sharer) only one writer in whom the world at large has interested itself. The situation was summed up and transfigured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all that it contained, and a good

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who followed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in favor of longer narratives. He preferred to call his books “Romances,” not novels. “When a writer calls his work a Romance,” Hawthorne explained in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, “he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.” The novelist, in Hawthorne’s terms, aims to achieve “a very minute fidelity” to experience, whereas the author of a romance may “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” while still maintaining strict allegiance to “the truth of the human heart.

The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to himself, of his originality and, as regards his own character, _unique_ quality, must have had a great charm for people living in a society in which introspection, thanks to the want of other entertainment, played almost the part of a social resource. In the United States, in those days, there were no great things to look out at (save forests and rivers); life was not in the least spectacular; society was not brilliant; the country was given up to a great material prosperity, a homely _bourgeois_ activity, a diffusion of primary education and the common luxuries. There was therefore, among the cultivated classes, much relish for the utterances of a writer who would help one to take a picturesque view of one’s internal possibilities, and to find in the landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight effects.

Over the course of an hour, I’d tried to explain to them how a good actor will always find things in a script that the writer doesn’t know are there while a bad one will insert things that the writer would prefer they didn’t. I’d talked to them about the way a character is created. Christopher Foyle, for example, existed on the page a long time before Michael Kitchen was cast but only when that decision had been made did the real work begin. There was always a tension between the two of us. For example, Michael insisted almost from the start that Foyle would never ask questions, which made life difficult for me and seemed, to say the least, unusual for a detective. And yet it wasn’t such a stupid idea. We found other, more original ways to get to the information that the plot demanded. Foyle had a way of insinuating himself, getting suspects to say more than they intended. In this way, year after year, the character developed.

Ever since, he has routed his rivals in the competition for readers. Emerson, once regarded as a dangerous infidel, remarked in his journal that “I hate goodies,” but he strikes many readers as something of a goody himself. That other New England worthy, Emerson’s neighbor and friend Henry D. Thoreau, tells us in Walden that he is seized by the desire “to devour” a woodchuck raw, but it seems a good bet that Thoreau cooked his meat thoroughly. These writers are kept alive mainly as classroom assignments; but Melville is different: he is a living presence in the larger culture. Among his contemporaries, he is today by far the largest, having combined Whitman’s New York bluster with Hawthorne’s New England gravity into a sensibility that created, in Moby-Dick, the one nineteenth-century American classic (possibly along with Huckleberry Finn) that remains morally powerful without having come to seem moralistic.

But their ideas threatened institutions such as State Street, Harvard College, and the Unitarian Establishment, and the transcendentalists were, singly and as a group, more radical and more socially and politically activist than such writers as Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville, who held older, darker views of man and nature. Most of the transcendentalists found that the ethical consequences of transcendental idealism impelled them into social, political, and intellectual reform.

In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age of realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance, no place for romance itself. For many years all the events leading up to the great war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly realistic, and the aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another name for idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now. Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo; and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson. It was Stevenson, particularly, who wielded a bludgeon against the realists. People live for the dream in their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied wall to look at in the dusk, some painted window leading to the soul.

Reason #2: The other reason you’ll want to track your productivity is because of a little-known principle called The Hawthorne Effect. This effect says that whatever you measure improves.

Reading Moby-Dick, we are in the presence of a writer who spent several impressionable years on a whaleship, internalized everything he saw, and seven or so years later, after internalizing Shakespeare, Hawthorne, the Bible, and much more, found the voice and the method that enabled him to broadcast his youthful experiences into the future. And this, ultimately, is where the great, unmatched potency of Moby-Dick, the novel, resides. It comes from an author who not only was there but possessed the capacious and impressionable soul required to appreciate the wonder of what he was seeing.

When there is fear,I will have my pen hold high,when the wonders of night give its light, I lie behind the familiar world with a strange crown, not of Lilly,nor of violets,not of hawthorn,not of maple,but burthen words my fallen tears build an avenger’s crown.

The relationship between writers and their agents is a peculiar one and I’m not even sure I fully understand it myself. Starting with the basics, writers need agents. Most writers are hopeless when it comes to contracts, deals, invoicing – in fact anything to do with business or common sense. Agents handle all of this in return for ten per cent of what you earn, a figure which is actually very reasonable until you start selling a lot of books – but when that happens, you no longer care. They don’t do very much else. They won’t really get you work.

Being the writer on a set is a strange experience. It’s hard to describe the sense of excitement, walking into something that owes its existence entirely to what happened inside my head.

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Every writer knows about the pathetic fallacy, where the weather, the light and even music can be used to manipulate a reader’s mood. But it seemed that I’d done quite the opposite, allowing my own mood to influence the weather.

I’d decided that all the titles would have some sort of literary reference. After all, I was a writer; he was a detective. The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’d already run out of grammatical allusions. Life Comes to a Full Stop? It wouldn’t make sense in America, where they have periods. The Case of the Missing Colon?

This is the plot of Mindgame: Mark Styler, a journalist and ‘true crime’ writer, is visiting a lunatic asylum called Fairfields where he hopes to interview a notorious serial killer, Easterman, for a book he is writing. First, he has to persuade the unwilling and unhelpful director of the institute, Dr Farquhar, to allow him access to his patient. Quite quickly, Styler comes to realise that not all is as it should be at Fairfields. For no good reason, there’s a full-length human skeleton hanging in Dr Farquhar’s office, and his assistant, Nurse Plimpton, is clearly frightened of something and tries to warn Styler to leave while he still can. As the action continues, the sense of uneasiness erupts into violence until it is revealed that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. The real Dr Farquhar is dead. Styler is trapped.

You’ve been sent here to look into the power line. I mean, the idea of going undercover with a bunch of second-class writers at a festival nobody’s ever heard of sounds pretty lunatic to me – but then I suppose you are French . . .’ ‘Thanks, Hawthorne,’ I growled.

And so I can’t even try? What does that leave me with? We’ve already agreed that I can’t write about Ahmet or Pranav. So presumably I can’t write about Maureen or Sky either . . . because they’re both women! Or Lucky because he’s a dog! At the end of the day, if I listened to you, I’d only write about myself! A book full of middle-aged white writers describing middle-aged white writers being murdered by middle-aged white writers!

Both McCoy and Salim knew I was a writer and they were enjoying talking to me. It’s funny how many people are keen to have their work described in books.

I spent the next couple of hours working. I went for a walk. I wrote a quick draft of the chapter Hawthorne wanted. I know it all sounds a bit dull laid out like that but I’m afraid I’m describing very much my life as a writer. I spend at least half the day on my own and in silence. I flit from one project to another, channelling thousands of words – first with a pen and then with a computer – onto the page. That’s why I enjoy writing Alex Rider. Even if I’m not having adventures, I can at least imagine them.

I’m with Anthony. He’s just arrived with the other writers.’ ‘Dark hair, untidy, going grey. Jewish. Late fifties. Didn’t shave this morning. Short-sleeved shirt, linen trousers . . . crumpled. Doesn’t look too pleased to be here.’ This not entirely flattering portrait of me was rattled out at speed and without emotion by her husband. ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he went on. ‘Liz likes to know who she’s talking to.

The truth is that literary festivals are the best thing in a writer’s life. To start with, they get you out of the house, out of your room. You meet people: readers and writers. You get to visit beautiful cities like Oxford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Bath. Better still, you might find yourself being whisked abroad – to Sydney, Sri Lanka, Dubai or Berlin. There’s even a literary festival on board Queen Mary

The thing about you, Tony, is you write stuff down without even realising its significance. You’re a bit like a travel writer who doesn’t know quite where he is.’ ‘That’s not true!’ ‘Yeah. It’s like you’re in Paris and you write how you’ve seen this big, tall building made of metal but you forget to mention that it might be worth a visit.

Most writers live with what is known as ‘imposter syndrome’, a chronic fear that at any moment they’ll be found out and their books will be unceremoniously taken off the shelves and pulped, reduced to a milky white substance that will then be reconstituted into new paper and used for somebody else’s book.

Hilda had already twisted my arm into signing a four-book deal with Penguin Random House, arranging delivery dates that even an AI-powered neural network machine would have had difficulty meeting. Either I’m too weak or I like writing too much, but I always seem to be locked in a room with a ream of A4 while other writers are out and about having a good time.

The first and still the most famous locked-room mystery is said to be The Murders in the Rue Morgue, written in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe, the man who inspired Sherlock Holmes. Here, a mother and a daughter are brutally murdered in their flat, the daughter stuffed up a chimney, but the door and the shutters are securely fastened from inside and the flat is four floors up from the street, with no way to climb in. The story has a great ending, but one that doesn’t really play fair. I’m not sure a modern writer would get away with it.

Where would we make our permanent home? I longed for the bustle of big-city life, while Dick sought the tranquility of the country. Our debate was finally resolved when we struck a perfect compromise in Concord, Massachusetts, a town of eighteen thousand residents twenty miles west of Boston—close enough for easy access to the city, but still a country community with a long, winding river, wooded areas, walking trails, plentiful farms, and a classic main street. We were both drawn to the town’s historical richness: the footprint of the antislavery movement, the circle of mid-nineteenth-century writers who had once dwelled within walking distance of one another—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott—and whose homes were still standing. Dick revered Emerson’s