WRITERS ON WRITING
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson, Life of Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson, Life of Samuel Johnson
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London
Jack London
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 by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality. Good prose is like a window pane.
George Orwell
George Orwell
Clichés are infallible symptoms of used thinking.
Martin Amis
Martin Amis
The power of acute observation is frequently referred to as cynicism by those who don’t have it.
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
William Strunk, Jr.
William Strunk, Jr.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E.L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem like a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
Robert Cormier
Robert Cormier
I have rewritten - often several times - every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
The most valuable of talents is never using two words when one will do.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
All I did this morning was remove a comma. All I did this afternoon was put it back again.
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
I can’t write five words but that I can change seven.
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.
John Hersey
John Hersey
Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – and the rest will be valuable.
Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Surely the artist must entertain. And one’s in a very bad way indeed if one can’t laugh. Laughter relaxes the characters in a novel. And if you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.
Henry Green
Henry Green
...art has always been the revenge of the human spirit upon the shortsighted. Consider the sublime achievements of Greece, the necrophilic grandeur of the Egyptians, the glory of the Romans, the awesome power of the Assyrians, the rise and fall of the Jews and their incomprehensible survival, and what are we left with but a handful of plays, essays, carved stones, and some strokes of paint on paper or the rock cave wall - in a word, art? The ironies abound. Artists are not particularly famous for their steady habits, the acceptability of their opinions, or their conformity with societal mores, but whatever is not turned into art disappears forever. It is very strange when you think about it, except for one thing that is not strange but quite logical: however dull or morally delinquent an artist may be, in his moment of creation, when his work pierces the truth, he cannot dissimulate, he cannot fake it. Tolstoy once remarked that what we look for in a work of art is the revelation of the artist’s soul, a glimpse of God. You can’t act that.
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
I’ll tell you what I think is cynical. I think it’s cynical to make a nice comedy about nice people doing nice things. I think that’s the act of a cynic because it’s not true. And also because it’s depriving the audience of the God-given release of the theatre. We need to go laugh at things, make fun of ourselves, say what you can’t say. To do that is a very affirmative action.
David Mamet
David Mamet
So step by step, book through book though seeing each time only to write another book, I eased myself into knowledge. To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself: at the end I was always surprised. The book before me always turned out to have been written by a man with incomplete knowledge. And the very first [novel] seemed to have been written by an innocent, a man at the beginning of knowledge both about himself and the writing career that had been his ambition.
V.S. Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul