Writers on Writing, Books, & Publishing

Edmund Wilson, when he married Mary McCarthy in 1938, decided that his wife ought to write fiction. She recalled: "We'd been married about a week, and he said, 'I think you've got a talent for writing short stories.' So he put me off in the one free room at Stamford with a typewriter and shut the door. I wrote 'Cruel and Barbarous Treatment' straight off, without blotting a line."
-- Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.
-- Eugene Ionesco

Sometimes I think it sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.
-- Gene Fowler

The profession of book-writing makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business.
-- John Steinbeck

Editors are the immemorial adversaries of writers, because most editors are editors because they wanted to be writers and failed, and they instinctively hate those who wanted to be writers and succeeded.
-- Jack Woodford

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
-- Don Marquis

Poets aren't very useful,
Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.
-- Ogden Nash

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
-- Raymond Chandler

A really good detective never gets married.
-- Raymond Chandler

In the march up to the heights of fame there comes a spot close to the summit in which a man reads nothing but detective stories.
-- Heywood Broun

Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
-- Samuel Johnson

Everyone needs an editor.
-- Tim Foote, commenting on the fact that Hitler's original title for Mein Kampf was Four-and-a-Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
-- H. G. Wells

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
-- Burton Rascoe

Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll,
In pleasing memory of all he stole.
-- Alexander Pope

Americans like fat books and thin women.
-- Russell Baker

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
-- Elbert Hubbard, The Philistine

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
-- Mark Twain

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
-- Anatole France

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
-- Desiderius Erasmus

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
-- Samuel Butler

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
-- Joseph Joubert

The players often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand."
-- Ben Jonson

A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
-- Henry Ward Beecher

The road to ignorance is paved with good editions.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Bob de Graff, who started Pocket Books, had a patent on a non-re-readable book, bound like a sealed memo pad, from which you would tear off each page after you'd read it.
-- Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
-- Ross Macdonald

Pretty women swarm around everybody but writers. Plain, intelligent women somewhat swarm around writers.
-- William Saroyan, A Writer's Declaration

Never make excuses, never let them see you bleed, and never get separated from your baggage.
-- Wesley Price, "Three Rules of Professional Comportment for Writers" (Saturday Evening Post)

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.
-- Morley Callaghan

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
-- Samuel Johnson

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
-- Olin Miller

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
-- Jules Renard

The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
-- William Faulkner

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
-- Lillian Hellman

If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing.
-- Lillian Hellman

I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
-- Fred Allen

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-- Robert Benchley

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
-- Irvin S. Cobb

Begin every story in the middle. The reader doesn't care how it begins, he wants to get on with it.
-- Louis L'Amour

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.
-- Agatha Christie

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
-- Don Marquis

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
-- Peter De Vries

When I want to read a book, I write one.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
-- Samuel Johnson

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
-- A. E. Housman

Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.
-- Noel Coward

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
-- Elmore Leonard

I don’t take notes; I don’t outline; I don’t do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamned thing. I’m a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can’t sell it as caviar.
-- Stephen King, 1995

As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living. Mine is clearly living. The folders I need are within reach, in the order of frequency with which I use them. True, it gets tricky to locate a folder in the lower levels. But if you have to find it, you look for it. That takes less time than putting them away every day.
-- Jean Piaget, 1973

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.
-- Philip Roth, 1971

When I was seven, I said to my mother, may I close my door? And she said, yes, but why to you want to close your door? And I said because I want to think. And when I was eleven, I said to my mother, may I lock my door? And she said, yes, but why do you want to lock your door? And I said because I want to write.
-- Dorothy West, 1995

A poem is a way of capturing a moment. I don’t do a lot of revisions because I think if you have to do that then you’ve got problems with the poem. Rather than polish the words, I take the time to polish the poem. If that means I start at the top a dozen times, that’s what I do. A poem’s got to be a single stroke, and I make it the best I can because it’s going to live.
-- Nikki Giovanni, 1975

I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working, I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour.
-- Joan Didion, 1972

I’ve never written any prose fiction on the typewriter. I’ve just always had a very comfortable relationship with No. 2 pencils and these yellow sheets, which I might add vary also in quality. Some you get are abominable: you can’t erase on them, which is something that I like to do. I would be almost in despair if I found myself on some island on vacation and unable to get yellow sheets. I could compose on white sheets, in longhand, but it would be an added handicap.
-- William Styron, 1979

Never confuse movement with action.
-- Ernest Hemingway

Nothing you write is sacred; everything can be revised. Write passionately. Edit like the frozen tundra.
-- Pam Hart

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
-- Walter Benjamin

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.
-- Frederick Locker-Lampson

First sentences are doors to worlds.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin

Literature was not born the day a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: Literature was born on the day a boy came crying "wolf, wolf," and there was no wolf behind him.
-- Vladimir Nabokov

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
-- Alice Munro

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That’s why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again.
-- Gabriel García Márquez

I always write from my own experiences whether I’ve had them or not.
-- Ron Carlson

You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to a young aspiring writer.

It’s astonishing how accurate intuition and imagination can be when given their heads.
-- Sydney Lea

Creative wrong memory is a source of art.
-- Marcel Proust

You can’t eat for eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours a day -- all you can do for eight hours a day is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
-- William Faulkner

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining . . . researching . . . talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
-- E. L. Doctorow

The wastepaper basket is the writer’s best friend.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
-- Norman Mailer

A story isn’t about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.
-- W. D. Wetherell

The difference between the right word and nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.
-- Mark Twain

Writing is a hard way to make a living, but a good way to make a life.
-- Doris Betts

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under the trees is not quite so good as the cinder-block study, but it will do. "The beginning of wisdom," according to a West African proverb, "is to get you a roof."
-- Annie Dillard

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
-- James Thurber

The ending is where the reader discovers whether he has been reading the same story the writer thought he was writing.
-- John Updike

While short stories often tell us things we don’t know anything about -- and this is good of course -- they should also, and maybe more importantly, tell us what everybody knows but what nobody is talking about. At least, not publicly.
-- Raymond Carver

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.
-- Flannery O’Connor

The only way to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done. The time to think of technique is when you’ve actually got the story in front of you.
-- Flannery O’Connor

We do not want to read or edit short stories which ask the reader to blame society for misfortunes inflicted on the characters by the author.
-- Memo from the editors of Atlantic

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
-- Elmore Leonard

Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
-- Eudora Welty

Please direct comments and inquiries to: Michael K. Smith