Now we know why some writers drink!

23 Dec, 2023

There is a stereotype out there about writers. They're talented and frustrated and hit the bottle way too often. Maybe the reason some talented writers are frustrated and drink to excess is because of what they're asked to write. Example:

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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023December 23, 2023

There is a stereotype out there about writers. They’re talented and frustrated and hit the bottle way too often. Maybe the reason Read More...

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.