A Quote by Mona Simpson

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

Mona Simpson

Quote Topics

After Basement Boiler Boiler Room Clean Collect Desk Down Go His Jacket John Keats Kept Near Putting Rituals Room Shirt Stories Tie Up White Work Write Writers

Quote Author

Mona Simpson
American - Novelist
Born: June 14, 1957

Let the fires go out in the boiler room of the church and the place will still look smart and clean, but it will be cold. The Prayer Room is the boiler room for its spiritual life.

Leonard Ravenhill

I could never write about the sort of people John Cheever or John Updike or even Margaret Atwood write about. I don't mean I couldn't write as well as they do, which of course I couldn't; they're great writers, and I'm no writer at all. But I couldn't even write badly about normal, neurotic people. I don't know that world from the inside. That's just not my orientation.

Jim Woodring

I went to see Dad in hospital after he had gone through one particularly grueling operation. I walked into the room where he was recovering, and he was sitting up in a chair, wearing his shirt and tie. That was after eight hours of surgery. I found that so moving.

Rachel Joyce

To John Cena after the fans kept throwing his shirt back in the ring : They didn't throw my shirt back.

CM Punk

I was at Plaza Athénée, where a jacket and tie was required. Andy Warhol came with his turtleneck, because he was always wearing a turtleneck, with a tie over it, and we gave him a jacket - so he had a jacket and tie over the turtleneck. It was pretty cool.

Daniel Boulud

I don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.

Edna Ferber

Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.

Walter Mosley

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

David Shields

He was the kind of kid you did not want to sit by. He kept his boogers in his desk, he wore a neck tie.

John Hiatt

A gray flannel suit by Thom Browne or Tom Ford can be worn a billion ways. I'll wear a gray flannel jacket with a white shirt, gray flannel tie, beat-up fatigues, and a dress shoe or Carpe Diem boots.

Nick Wooster

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories...The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.

Elena Ferrante

A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.

Daniel Handler

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.

J. D. Salinger

When I first starting writing, and no one was paying me, in order to feel like I had a real job, I would get out of bed, put on a jacket and tie every morning, and sit down at my desk.

Graham Moore

Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.