ZZ Packer famous quotes

I think when we engage in language we are engaging in something that is specifically and primally human.
-- ZZ Packer

#Writing #Thinking #Language

Well, as a short-story writer, I don't think there are any weaknesses to the genre itself. I guess I would say that the difficulty of the form is that one must create an entire world in five to 30 pages, as opposed to 300. There is very little room for fat - you must be economical. And you must begin as close to the end as you possibly can.
-- ZZ Packer

#Writing #Thinking #Stories

Be wary of feeling as through there is not enough room at the table. Oftentimes a female Chinese-American might feel as through she is in competition with another Chinese-American woman writer of the same generation. A writer friend of mine calls it the "There Can Only Be One ..." syndrome. This isn't "Survivor." The more good writers, of all walks of life and all ethnicities and persuasions, the better.
-- ZZ Packer

#Writing #Ethnicity #Competition

The big issue was cutting. I finally cut as much as I could, about a fourth of the story, and actually liked it.
-- ZZ Packer

#Cutting #Issues #Editing

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't.

I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.

Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Act averse to nasty language and partial to fruity tea.