Writers and Devils

What Authors Say About Their Demons

 

 

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

— William Faulkner

[W]riting Damned was my escape. I'd already found myself in Hell, so why not write about it?

— Chuck Palahniuk

 

 

Jealousy is one of the occupational hazards of being a writer, and the most degrading. And I, who have been the Leona Helmsley of jealousy, have come to believe that the only things that help ease or transform it are (a) getting older, (b) talking about it until the fever breaks, and (c) using it as material.

— Anne Lamott

 

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction.

— Flannery O'Connor

 

 

Then I was set upon in the street. I'm not saying it was racial, but there was blood on my typewriter. I asked for help, but no one would stop. I can either die the romantic death—and death does seem beautiful when you are on the edge—or I can use the energy in my rage, burn it another way, take the chaos out of my soul.

— Ben Okri

 

Just the way my mother said ‘nihilism’ gave it a dangerous foreign sound, like an Italian stiletto. Or like Nitezsche.... Nothing sensible and Anglo-Saxon about nihilism. Nihilism was of the devil, it was the beginning of all criminal behaviour. Who would ever behave if life was meaningless?

— Tim Parks

 

 

I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience hereafter would be turned into tales.

— Isak Dinesen

 

I'm writing about shades of evil. You have Voldemort, a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people's suffering, and there ARE people like that in the world. But then you have Wormtail, who out of cowardice will stand in the shadow of the strongest person.

— J.K. Rowling

 

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

— Gregory Maguire

 

 

Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms.... I don't believe this business of 'No, I don't write for myself, I write for the public.' That's nonsense. Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself. He writes not to communicate with other people, but to communicate more assuredly with himself. It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

— Harper Lee

 

No matter how much people go, I like that, or that was a wonderful speech, I spent a decade of failure just failing. Watching students of mine publish books while I couldn’t put it together. I never got off that, it defines so much of what I do.... It's like you’ve been assigned your corner of hell to map and if you fail mapping it, they're gonna send someone else."

— Junot Diaz

 

The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar.... What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are 'report a crime' and 'report to five families.' The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—'chink' words and 'gook' words too—that they do not fit on my skin.

— Maxine Hong Kingston

 

Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

— Stephen Fry

 

Are we writers only to threaten, terrify, and depress our readers with our ruthless honesty: have we not as good a right to offer them whatever comfort we've come by honestly?

— Ursula Le Guin

 

The Devil—had he fidelity Would be the best friend— Because he has ability— But Devils cannot mend—

— Emily Dickinson

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Publishing Information for Quotes:

1. William Faulkner: "The Art of Fiction No. 12," interviewed by Jean Stein, Paris Review, Spring 1956.
2. Chuck Palahniuk: "King of the Damned," profile and interview by Stephen Daultrey, Bizarre, September 2011.
3. Anne Lamott: From her Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Pantheon/Random House, 1994, p.124).
4. Flannery O'Connor: From her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, p.26).
5. Ben Okri: "Ben Okri's Green-Apple, Left-Handed Sort of Day," profile and interview by Hunter Davies, Independent, March 1993.
6. Tim Parks: From his Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing (Harvill Secker/Random House, 2010, p.276).
7. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen): From Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman (St. Martin's, 1982, p.258).
8. J.K. Rowling: "'Fire' Storm," profile and interview by Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly, September 7, 2000.
9. Gregory Maguire: From his Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (HarperCollins, 1995, p.357).
10. Harper Lee: From Counterpoint ("penetrating comments" from "63 leading authors, critics, and playwrights"), compiled and edited by Roy Newquist (Rand McNally, 1964, p.410).
11. Junot Diaz: "Junot Diaz—Interview" by Richard Liddicoat, article about Diaz and the 2008 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Christchurch City Libraries, New Zealand.
12. Maxine Hong Kingston: From her The Woman Warrior, originally published by Knopf in 1975 (Vintage International edition, 1989, p.53).
13. Stephen Fry: From his Moab Is My Washpot (Hutchinson/Random House, 1997, p.79).
14. Ursula Le Guin: "Chronicles of Earthsea," online interview with Le Guin in response to readers' questions, Guardian, February 9, 2004.
15. Emily Dickinson: From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, number 1479, originally written circa 1879 (Little, Brown, 1960, pp.624-625). For an earlier rendition of the same lines, see "XCII" of "The Single Hound" in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1924).

 

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Martha Nichols, TW's editor in chief, has experience with all the deadly sins. But as she says of wrath, her nemesis, "I’m dogged by a constant inner tirade that sometimes seems like one long angry conversation with everyone who sets me off."

Ryan says he's "the personification of contradiction": a sloth with pride. He should be writing the next great American sitcom. Instead, he imagines his Emmy acceptance speech, in which he thanks his pretend-mother Tina Fey and informs the audience that if he vomits, it's only from sheer excitement. They will laugh, as he cradles his winged, golden idol.

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