Top 22 Betsy Lerner Quotes
#1. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.
Betsy Lerner
#2. I understood Truman Capote's brilliant assessment of the writer's dilemma: When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.
Betsy Lerner
#3. Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can you tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything.
Betsy Lerner
#4. I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers.
Betsy Lerner
#5. But every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.
Betsy Lerner
#6. I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before.
Betsy Lerner
#7. It's just a game," she says. Make no mistake: people who say it's just a game are out for blood.
Betsy Lerner
#8. Fear of failure is the reason most often cited to explain why so many aspiring writers never realize their dreams. But I think it's that same fear of failure that absolutely invigorates those who do push through-that is, the fear of not being heard.
Betsy Lerner
#9. Tomorrow, I am fifty-two years old. And I want to say unequivocally that I am very happy to be alive, that being alive is better than being dead. And if I have just one wish it is this: that you work with all your might and love with all your heart and never lose hope and never give up.
Betsy Lerner
#10. I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.
Betsy Lerner
#11. But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.
Betsy Lerner
#12. What I want to know it whether we're supposed to change or just accept who we are?
Betsy Lerner
#13. For the writer who truly loves language, a trip to the copy editor is like a week at a spa. You come out looking younger, trimmer, and standing straighter.
Betsy Lerner
#14. Just remember that this relationship is based on mutual trust and respect, so never reveal your true self.
Betsy Lerner
#15. Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.
Betsy Lerner
#16. The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.
Betsy Lerner
#17. It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.
Betsy Lerner
#18. Writing, like drugs and recreational sex, becomes an activity associated with youth.
Betsy Lerner
#19. No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.
Betsy Lerner
#20. The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.
Betsy Lerner
#21. All writers are like bomb-throwers, whether they attack with dense academic prose or jazzy riffs of stream-of-consciousness writing.
Betsy Lerner
#22. There is a necessary gestation period during which a writer should protect his work, because the minute he sends it out, or joins a writing group, or enrolls in an MFA program, he engages the part of himself that is focused on the result more than the work. For
Betsy Lerner
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