As a writer sometimes I need inspiration. Who better to offer that than those who have successfully mastered the craft? So I turn to the experts and listen, or read, what they have to say about writing.
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
– Stephen King
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
– C.S. Lewis
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
– Madeleine L’Engle
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
– Maya Angelou
In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.
– John Grisham
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
– Ernest Hemingway
I think the writer, as I’ve said before, is completely amoral. He takes whatever he needs, wherever he needs, and he does that openly and honestly because he himself hopes that what he does will be good enough so that after him people will take from him, and they are welcome to take from him, as he feels that he would be welcome by the best of his predecessors to take what they had done.
– William Faulkner
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself … It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.
– Harper Lee
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
I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
– Roald Dahl
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
– Ray Bradbury
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
– Oscar Wilde
Good advice. I should follow it.
Please excuse me. I have work to do.