WRITERS ON WRITING "Your language becomes clear and strong, not when you can no longer add, but when you can no longer take away." Isaac Babel, 1894-1940 "Writers are always selling someone out." Joan Didion "Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money." George Orwell "Get black on white." Guy de Maupassant "Good prose is like a window pane." George Orwell "You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal." Russian proverb "There is but one art, to omit." Robert Louis Stevenson "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." Henry David Thoreau "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?" E.M. Forster "When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished." Phillip Roth "Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that too?" Susan Sontag