...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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Gustave Flaubert
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
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Chuck Palahniuk
In order to write about life first you must live it.
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Ernest Hemingway
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can...
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Stephen Fry
More Quotes By John Gardner
It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.
This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even...
People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
As every writer knows.. there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind...
The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent....
