“Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he we wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.
You have your list of favorite writers; I have mine. Dickens, Twain, Wolfe, Peacock, Shaw, Moliere, Jonson, Wycherley, Sam Johnson. Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Pope. Painters; El Greco, Tintoretto. Musicians: Mozart, Haydn, Ravel, Johann Strauss (!). Think of all these names and you think of big or little, but nonetheless important, zest, appetites, hungers. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind.”
Ray Bradbury
Zen in the Art of Writing
[…] “Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he we wants […] Original Source… […]