Quotes About Writing

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirin, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

I write a thousand words a day. At that rate you'll write War and Peace in a year... or very near the entire output of E.M. Forster.

First, don't write poetry. Second ditto; third ditto.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend.

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to starve anywhere.

A drama critic is a person who surprises a writer by informing him what he meant.

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers I'd be a politician.

Yes, I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

What we want is a story that starts with an earthquake and builds to a climax.

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford.

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

If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Many a clever boy is flogged into a dunce and many an original composition corrected into mediocrity.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.

I think it's a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it's finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

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

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.

© 2007 by Joe Clifford Faust