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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023May 9, 2025 353

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:

Why Writers Drink

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Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

G.K. Chesterton

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

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

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

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

The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

Douglas Adams

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.