If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told.
_{(Harry Crews, 1992)}

According to his obituaries, Harry Crews was a hell-raiser, a wild man, a drunken sage who made a right mess of his life.

What Crews should be remembered for are his essays (some of the best are in Blood and Grits and Florida Frenzy), his novels (including A Feast of Snakes), and above all, perhaps, his memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978).

Crews, who died on March 28, 2012, should also be remembered as a passionate teacher. For close to 30 years he worked in the creative writing program at the University of Florida. It's no surprise, then, that he had more than a few things to say about writing and the writer's life.

• Learning to Write
  That learning to write was taking so long did not surprise or discourage me. At least I tried not to let it. No one knew better than I how hit-and-miss my learning had been. But I remain convinced in my belief that all anybody needed to develop as a writer was access to a good library and the willingness to play fast and loose with his life, because make no mistake about it, by the time a person even moderately masters any art form, it is almost too late to do anything else.
  _{(Introduction to Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader. Touchstone, 1993)}
• Persistence
  I just felt like, look, if I keep writing and the damn stuff is good, sooner or later somebody is going to bite. I mean it's like fishing, man: keep your hook in the water. You ain't going to get no fish if there ain't no hooks in the water. Keep putting them in there. Wait.
  _{(Interview with A.B. Crowder, Writing in the Southern Tradition: Interviews With Five Contemporary Authors. Rodopi, 1990)}

• Dissatisfaction
  I've never finished any . . . book, including the one I just finished, where I didn't say, "Well, son, you blew it again." That's what led Graham Greene to say that the artist is doomed to perpetual failure. Conception is pristine and pure and has all manner of hope in it, but between conception and execution, something gets lost.
  _{(Quoted by Rob Michaels in "Harry Crews: Pen Packin' Old Boy." Motorbooty, Winter 1990)}
• Good and Bad Writing
  Writing is good to the degree that it is concrete and specific. And bad to the degree that it is abstract and vague.
  _{(Interview with Erik Bledsoe, July 26, 1997. Quoted in Perspectives on Harry Crews by Erik Bledsoe. University Press of Mississippi, 2001)}
• Teaching Writing
  A writer can't be taught, but he can be coached. . . . Criticism should never be a monologue. It ought to be a dialogue. Mainly because you're trying to get a young writer--and sometimes an old, established writer--to see what he has done. He is so damn close to it, has lived with it for so long, that he can't see it anymore.
  _{(Interview with Erik Bledsoe, July 26, 1997. Quoted in Perspectives on Harry Crews by Erik Bledsoe. University Press of Mississippi, 2001)}
• The Gift of Writing
  I owe writing . . . more than I could ever repay it. It's given me something in the world very few people have. I love my work, I can't wait to get to it, and I don't ever want to quit. It's given my life focus, intensity, meaning.
  _{(Quoted by Charles Fishman in "A Few Moments With Harry Crews." Florida Magazine, Nov. 11, 1990)}
• A Place for Writing
  If a man's got a place where he won't freeze to death when he puts his head down to go to sleep, and if he's got enough to eat, well then he's pretty much all right. When I lived out on the lake in Melrose, there was not a bed in the house. I slept on the floor and I wrote Gypsy's Curse sitting on two concrete blocks at a desk made out of a door.
  _{("Harry Crews: An Interview." Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South, 1981)}
• The Courage to Start Over
  About two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I threw away half a novel. Threw it away. Because I'd made a wrong turn. . . . The amateur, or the coward, or the non-writer, will try to keep it and make it work 'cause he doesn't want to have to throw it away and do all of that over again, another way. The real artist, with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire and does it again.
  _{(Quoted by Nate Rawlings in The Week, April 2012)}

If this is the first you've heard of Harry Crews, consider picking up a copy of Classic Crews (Touchstone, 1993), which contains two novels, three essays, and the full text of his remarkable memoir.