Writers on Writing

• Peter Abelard: Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, for it is a dangerous and a contagious disease.

• Isaac Asimov: (from Asimov Laughs Again)
  I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters in three segments, all at once, though they were to be run on three separate days. In between two of the segments, she asked me how many books I had written, and I told her. She said, "Don't you ever want to do anything but write?"
  "No," I said.
  "Don't you want to go hunting? Fishing? Dancing? Hiking?"
  And I said, "No! No! No! and No!"
  She said, "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?"
  I said, "Type faster."

• Daniel J Boorstin, Librarian of Congress: (On why he writes at home from 6:30 to 8:30 AM) "I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early."

• Winston Churchill: "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."

• Charles Dickens, in the voice of Mr. Brownlow, _Oliver Twist_: "Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brickmaking to turn to."
• Dryden: "Learn to write well, or not to write at all."

• Ben Franklin: "You write with ease to show your breeding / But easy writing is cursed hard reading."

• John Gardner, _On Becoming a Novelist_: "More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists."

• Gardner: "One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel."

• Guindon cartoon: "Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is."

• Robert A. Heinlein: "Writing is not neccessarily something to be ashamed of -- but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

• Ernest Hemingway, when asked what was the most frightening thing he ever encountered, answered: "A blank sheet of paper."

• Phillip Larkin: "Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off."

• Madeleine L'Engle: "I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe."

• Frederick Locker-Lampson: "I believe that nothing completely satisfies an imaginative writer but copious and continuous draughts of unmitigated praise, always provided it is accompanied by a large and increasing sale of his works."

• Lowell, "A Fable for Critics": "Nature suits all her children with something to do. He who would write, but cannot, can surely review."

• John D. MacDonald: "If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing."

• W. Somerset Maugham: "If you can tell stories,create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."

• Maugham: "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

• Flannery O'Connor: "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

• Georgia O'Keefe: "One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one's life going. You get the garden planted the roof fixed. You take the dog to the vet. You spend the day with a friend. You learn to make a new kind of bread. You hunt up photographs for someone who thinks he needs them. You certainly have to do the shopping. You may even enjoy doing such things. You think they have to be done. You even think that you have to have some visitors or take a trip to keep from getting queer living alone with just two chows. But all day you wait for the time you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot-in a way it is what you do the other things for... The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons, all the other things that makes one's life."

• Dorothy Parker: "If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."

• Sylvia Plath: "Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."

• Plath:"Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals."

• Plato: "Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot."

• Pope: "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance."

• Allegra Sloman: "It's in my skull and it has to come out."

• James Thurber: "With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs."

• Mark Twain: "If I had more time, I would write a shorter story."

• Twain: "A classic is something everybody talks about and nobody has read."

• William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary."

• Ernest Hemingway, on William Faulkner: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

• Carson McCullers: "I have MORE to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner."

• Most writers: "You open a vein."

• Anon: "The relationship of editor to author is knife to throat."

• Anon: "A blank page is God's way of showing you how hard it is to be God."

• Anon (paraphrasing Red Smith): "Writing is easy. Just stare at the computer until beads of blood form on your forehead."