Showing posts with label quotes about writer's life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotes about writer's life. Show all posts

Sunday, July 14, 2013

What your mother never told you about writing





If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.

Poppy Z. Brite 


Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf









The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. 

William Faulkner




I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Gustave Flaubert


Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein 








It's tougher than Himalayan yak jerky in January.


Richard Krzemien 



Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.


Rosemary Mahoney 




A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down.

Edna St. Vincent Millay


Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Paul Valery 






Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

Jessamyn West


I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. 


Oscar Wilde 






If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.
William Zinsser 


Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Anonymous