Dan Barden quotes

It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.
-- Dan Barden

#Writing #Needs #Firsts

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.

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

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?

I don't want to abandon one work for the other, and I don't think I need to sacrifice anything to put my all into either one of them.

Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession's phlegm, and needs no ancestors.

My success is not measured in money. I have no financial security, I have no savings account. I measure my success by asking myself if I’m telling a story that the world needs to hear, if I am educating people.

You don't need vision to be a visionary.

Nobody ever forgets their first night in the bush. It's among the precious, meagre handful of life firsts that remain indelible.

If at first you don't succeed/You can dust it off and try again/Dust yourself off and try again.