I like to collect quotes from famous authors on the ideas of “writing”, thinking those quotes might be of some help to me in my quest to evolve. Here they are, below, in no particular order. Some are serious, some are playful, some are quite funny, but all give the reader something serious to think about.
Elmore Leonard: If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
G.K, Chesterton: I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
Jonathan Franzen: It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Ernest Hemmingway: Write drunk. Edit sober.
Elbert Hubbard: Grammar is the grave of letters.
Charles Baudelaire: Always be a poet, even in prose.
Annie Proulx: Write slowly and by hand and only about subjects that interest you.
Margaret Atwood: Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
Zadie Smith: Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand—but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Annie Dillard: Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.
William Faulkner: Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
Neil Gaiman: Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you.
Dorothy Parker: If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
Robert Heinlein: Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Stephen King: The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
Enid Bagnold: Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.
George Orwell: Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
Roald Dahl: I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.
Virginia Woolf: Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.
Jim Tully: Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.
L. Stine: People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.
Ray Bradbury: Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
Mark Twain: The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
Ernest Hemingway: When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.