70 Quotes by John McPhee

A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there.

I’d much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk.

In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.

It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.

Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something – anything – as a first draft.

A writer has to have some kind of compulsive drive to do his work. If you don’t have it, you’d better find another kind of work, because it’s the only compulsion that will drive you through the psychological nightmares of writing.

No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing.

Writers come in two principal categories – those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure.

On each of two porches lie big chunks of serpentine – smooth as talc, mottled black and green. When you see rocks like that on a porch, a geologist is inside.