The first draft of everything is shit. – Ernest Hemingway
Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass. – David Ogilvy
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home. – Paul Theroux
I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. – Harper Lee
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. – Jack London
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with 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
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. –W. Somerset Maugham
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. – Neil Gaiman
Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright
If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do. – William Zinsser
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
Write drunk, edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway
Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very,’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. ― Neil Gaiman
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ― Ray Bradbury
Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – Lev Grossman
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. – Octavia E. Butler
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. – Sylvia Plath
When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done. – Stephen King
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. – Franz Kafka
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
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. – Robert Frost
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. – Chinua Achebe
