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A good writing quote can give me goosebumps.Image: Orzetto at
it.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0], from Wikimedia Commons
For those days when the well is feeling dry and a tad echo-y, I
keep a running list of my favorite quotes—things I’ve read, things
I’ve edited, things I’ve found in the WD archives, things people
have said to me in interviews.
Such tiny, perfect revelations.
A couple of years ago, I posted a portion of this list on my old WD
blog (around the same time we ran a great quote feature on 90 tips
from bestselling authors in the magazine). Recently, someone asked
if I was still collecting quotes.
Here’s the latest iteration of the list. (I’d love to expand it,
too—please share some of your favorites in the Comments section of
this blog post.)
Happy Friday, and happy writing.
*
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King
“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.”
—Enid Bagnold
“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it
heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to
shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any
more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies.
Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a
work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, WD
“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 on by some demon whom one can neither
resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell
“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD
“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary
thinking all my life.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am
going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some
lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw
attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
—George Orwell
“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as
he finishes the book.”
—Roald Dahl, WD
“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or
perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a
master.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life,
every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
—Virginia Woolf
“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. …
Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned
tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for
everything.”
—Stephen King, WD (this quote is from an interview with King in our
May/June 2009 issue)
“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
—Peter Handke
“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”
—William Zinsser, WD
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me,
Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
—William Faulkner
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization
that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen
“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a
lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting
them.”
—Gore Vidal
“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives
are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find
ways to make them interesting.”
—John Updike, WD
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order
to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one
book.”
—Samuel Johnson
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets
in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in
English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the
narrative.”
—Elmore Leonard
“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no
shortcuts.”
—Larry L. King, WD
“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when
you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and
fetishizing masterpieces.”
—Allegra Goodman
“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve
written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think
the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once
they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
—Richard Ben Cramer
“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can
there ever be.”
—Doris Lessing
“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
—Jules Renard