When I was writing my novel, sitting alone at my kitchen table in my cat hair- covered pajamas, staring into my computer screen with my unwritten book stretching out into infinite un-doneness before me, I had a quote taped to my wall for inspiration.
The quote was by Tom Robbins and I’ve never been able to find it again but he was talking about the process of writing and how important it is to embrace the solitude. He said that there were plenty of writers out there who were better than he was, but that they couldn’t bare sitting alone in a room for the time it took to write a book and so part of being a great writer was being able to be alone.
With my own writing, the solitude is one of the hardest parts for me. Believe me, I’ve tried to write in the middle of a party, had “study groups” that usually wind up with me making a lasagna for everyone, worked in cafes, parks, anywhere where there’s a pulse but I have to face it: there will be no words on no pages unless it’s me, a blank wall and Senor de Solitude.
At some point the page with my quote on it got blown across the room and landed in a bowl of soup but I tacked it back up anyway, all crinkly and swollen and stinky like all well-loved security blankets. It was such a great help to me that I’d still keep the filthy thing taped to my wall if I only knew where it was.
It’s in this spirit that I went in search of more great quotes from other great writers. If there’s one that speaks to you and can hold your hand throughout your process, write it down and keep it near and dear. And keep it away from soup.
“If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one…he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.”
- Honore de Balzac
“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
“Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.”
- Thomas Berger
“Style has always been in my mind the author’s Self, the creative expression of that Self.”
- Whit Burnett
“The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.”
- John Campbell
“Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.”
- Lord Chesterfield
“A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just begins
to live that day.”
- Emily Dickinson
“Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.”
- Harlan Ellison
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”
- 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
“If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged…I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.”
- Erica Jong
“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”
- Barbara Kingsolver
“This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.”
- Barbara Kingsolver
“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.”
- Anne Lamott
“If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.”
- Somerset Maugham
“There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are.”
- Somerset Maugham
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
- Herman Melville
“Don’t sell yourself short; dare to dream. You might sell to a top market before you ever sell to a non-paying market – you won’t know unless you try.”
- Rheal Nadeau
“Make it new.”
- Ezra Pound
“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.”
- Ayn Rand
“Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance.”
- Stanley Schmidt
“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.”
- Sidney Sheldon
“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.”
- Sidney Smith
“By writing much, one learns to write well.”
- Robert Southey
“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.”
- James F. Stephan
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”
- Jane Yolen
“Pay attention to the sound of words.”
- Dave Wolverton
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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