Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Writers")

August 24—30, 2025 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Writers"

Opening Line of the Week

The opening words come from George Verrey Smith, a London schoolteacher who is bored with both his life and his wife (who, by the way, is ironically named “Joy”). The “I am but I’m not” nature of the opener not only piques our interest, but we soon learn that it also mirrors the nature of George’s life.

For six days of the week he lives a perfectly conventional life, but on Sundays he adorns himself in a blond wig and his wife’s discarded dresses and becomes “Emily.” His well-established routine is ultimately shattered when, during a stint as Emily, one of his colleagues is murdered—and Emily becomes a prime suspect.

For more than 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

I’m currently working on “The Best Opening Lines of 2025,” and, as Paul McCartney might put it, could use “a little help from my friends.” You can e-mail candidates to me at: drmardy@drmardy.com. If you recommend a great opener I haven’t yet seen and it makes my final list, I’ll send you a personally-inscribed copy of one of my books.

This Week’s Puzzler

On August 25, 1949, this man was born in Oxford, England. Even though his father was a famous English writer, he showed little interest in literature—or any other school subjects—as he grew up. Indeed, he performed so poorly in elementary school that one of his early headmasters cleverly described him as “unusually unpromising.”

By age sixteen, he had read nothing but comic books when his stepmother, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to the works of Jane Austen. It turned out to be a life-changing experience. Almost overnight, he got turned on to literature—and he went on to deepen that interest considerably as he attended Oxford University’s Exeter College. After graduating in 1971, he worked for several years at The Times Literary Supplement before taking a job at the New Statesman. A few years later, at age 27, he became the publication’s youngest literary editor.

After his first novel—The Rachel Papers in 1973—won the Somerset Maugham award, he went on to become one of his era's most popular and prolific writers, with novels like Money (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995). In 2008, The Times of London hailed him as one of the 50 greatest post-WWII English writers.

A prolific short-story writer as well as a novelist, he published seven collections, including Einstein's Monster (1987) and Heavy Water (1998). He also excelled in the non-fiction arena, with an acclaimed memoir—Experience, in 2000—and five separate collections of his essays, including The Moronic Inferno (1986) and Visiting Mrs. Nabokov (1993).

Early in his career, he was a hip, brash, and irreverent figure who was dubbed “the Mick Jagger of English letters.” In a 2003 article, Washington Post editor Carol Burns wrote of him:

“His reputation as the bad boy of British writing shouldn’t overpower the fact that he’s simply a fantastic writer. His brash, intelligent novels are sharp with insight, and his wordplay makes reading [him] feel like playing: swinging high in a swing, hanging from monkey bars, just having fun.”

In his career, he offered memorable observations on countless topics, including these three about writers:

Who is this person? Who was his famous father? (Answers below)

A Peek Inside the World of Writers

The quotations in this week’s Puzzler may be seen as an insider’s “take” on the world of writers. Let’s take a close look at what he’s saying.

Writers Need a Wound, Either Physical or Spiritual

Notice that this week’s Mystery Man isn’t saying that most writers have a wound, but rather that they need one. If he’d said the former, he would’ve been expressing a time-honored idea—that writers are drawn to their profession as a direct result of trouble or turmoil in their lives.

An important offshoot of this idea is that writers approach writing as a form of therapy. In this conception, the healing of an emotional injury or overcoming of a traumatic life event is a driving force for writers. This idea first emerged in antiquity and it continues to be popular today. The American novelist Pat Conroy was clearly thinking along these lines when he wrote:

Somewhere along the way, the concept of the “suffering artist” morphed into the idea that an unhappy childhood was essential for an aspiring writer—and, further, that a happy childhood could actually be a handicap. Yes, I know it sounds a little upside-down, but this notion has been embraced by many writers over the years. In her memoir The Little Locksmith (1942), for example, Katharine Butler Hathaway put it this way:

“I lived in the midst of an affectionate charming family, and I am sure that there is no greater obstacle to a person who is just beginning to write.”

This idea is now so popular we find it routinely expressed by humorists, stand-up comics, and cartoonists:

To return to our Mystery Man’s idea that most writers need a wound, I regard his observation as an intriguing reminder that most writers don’t write “from scratch” or from a simple urge to create something. They write because they have a wound that demands their attention.

You’ll understand the dynamics better when you think of a wound not as an injury, but as a loss of equilibrium that throws life off balance in some important way. The disequilibrium might be traced to something that happened in the home during childhood, in a classroom while in college, or at work last month. Or it may not be tied to an event at all, just a gnawing sense that life no longer provides the joy or meaning it once did. Whatever the provenance, the emotional wobbliness is almost impossible to ignore.

Seen this way, writing becomes a practical tool for restoring balance, or at least getting back to steady ground. Writers take the thing that’s knocked them off-center and explore it in the same way they’d investigate any subject—by asking questions, turning it around in their minds, seeing it from different angles, tracing its contours, and maybe even discovering its true meaning. James Baldwin expressed it well in Notes of a Native Son (1955):

“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

And his words have been echoed in a variety of ways by others:

Put together, that’s the job of the writer: to turn life’s “slings and arrows” into something they can understand—and perhaps even live with. When their deepened understanding restores even a measure of equilibrium to their lives, it’s a major advance—for the writer first, and then for any readers who recognize their own lives in the words.

The second and third points in this week’s Puzzler overlap considerably, so let’s explore them together rather than separately.

Writers Are Most Alive When Alone

Writers Have Many People Watching Over Them

Generally speaking, when people say they feel “most alive,” they’re doing something that is so deeply absorbing that the hours can pass like minutes. For the most part, the activity is also challenging enough that it stretches one’s capabilities, but not so difficult that it becomes overwhelming. And, finally, when what they’re doing is also in close alignment with their core values and sense of identity, they end up thinking: This is life at its best.

Such is the world of many who’ve contracted “the writing bug.” Even when they put in long and grueling hours, many would be in hearty agreement with Noël Coward’s famous quip about acting: “Work is more fun than fun.” For writers, of course, all of this is happening when, technically speaking, they’re alone in a room. And while the act of writing is done by a single individual, it is the least solitary of solitary pursuits.

Alone in a room, writers imagine a reader who does not yet exist for words that have not yet been fully written. While the text is being crafted, writers also feel the presence of those who’ve formed them, including, as our Mystery Man said earlier, “Mom. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.” And, to be sure, the gallery of people filling the room also includes the writer’s personal heroes.

Bellow’s observation captures a fascinating—and widespread—phenomenon in the literary world: the tendency for aspiring writers to imitate the writings of authors they admire as they try to find their own “voice.”

Robert Louis Stevenson put it this way: “Whenever I read a book…that particularly pleased me…I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.” Joan Didion wrote about her life, “When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out [Ernest Hemingway’s] stories to learn how the sentences worked.” Hunter S. Thompson’s editor once said of him: “He taught himself to write by reading The Great Gatsby aloud as he typed out the entire novel.” About this widespread practice, Neal Gaiman said, “The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing.”

As writers mature, they generally find their own style, but even with great writers, the voices of literary heroes whisper in the background. Ernest Hemingway could barely write a sentence without thinking about writers he admired, and he not only compared his writing to theirs, he imagined himself in a lifelong competition with them. You’re probably familiar with the famous pugilistic metaphor he offered in his 1950 New Yorker interview with Lillian Ross:

“I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”

The point is, for a profession widely regarded as solitary, there are a whole lot of people in the rooms—and in the minds—of almost all writers.

The rooms of writers get especially crowded—and more raucous—when we turn to the world of fiction writers. In his memoir The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (2015), Frederick Forsyth wrote:

“A writer lives half his life inside his own head. In this tiny space, entire worlds are created or erased and probably both. People come into being, work, love, fight, die, and are replaced. Plots are devised, developed, amended, and come to fruition or are frustrated. It is a completely different world from the one outside the window.”

Judy Blume expressed a similar idea when she once said in an interview:

“My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book. They become so real to me, I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.”

For those of you who regard writing as a solitary activity, I would reply, yes, but only on the surface, and only from the perspective of an observer. Inside the mind of writers, we find a world populated by a large and colorful assortment of people—and to return to the idea that writers are most alive when alone, let me conclude by saying that they’re most alive when they’re alone with their fictional characters:

So, there we have it, a peek into the world of writers, inspired by a few simple observations from a well known practitioner of the craft. Hope you enjoyed it.

This week, take a few moments to answer the question, “When you take away all the trappings, what do you think makes someone a writer? What is the essence of what writers do and who they are?” Before doing anything, though, take a few moments to peruse this week’s compilation of quotations on the subject.

• First and foremost I write for myself. Writing has been for a long time my major tool for self-instruction and self-development. — Toni Cade Bambara

• The real writer is haunted by a plot which he must write out of inner necessity. — Edmund Bergler

• All writers are seekers; all writing is an effort to find the self in the world and the world in the self. — Sidney Cox

• I don’t think of writing as a career. I don’t think of it as an occupation. I think of it as the way I’m alive. I don’t know how to exist otherwise. — E. L. Doctorow

• Writing is making sense of life. — Nadine Gordimer

• I write about what breaks my heart. What I don’t understand. And what I wish I could change. — Terry McMillan

• Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction. — Anaïs Nin

• I’m highly irritable and my senses bruise easily, and when they are bruised, I write. — S. J. Perelman

• I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself. — May Sarton

• All my writing was born out of anger. In order to contain it, I had to write. If I had not written, I would have exploded. — Elie Wiesel

For source information on these quotations and many others on the theme of WRITERS, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answers to This Week’s Puzzler:

Martin Amis (1949-2023). Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Self-Control.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note