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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023May 9, 2025 720

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

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

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

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote Quote

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

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

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

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 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

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

Sidney Sheldon

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.