Favorite Writer's Quotes and Miscellaneous Odds and Ends

“NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.” –William Goldman

     "Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use."---Mark Twain

 
Steinbeck on Writing Biography

by Fred Allen

      Some years ago John Steinbeck offered to help me with a book. I didn’t know how to write a book. John listed some rudimentary suggestions for the beginner. I pass them on to you. John wrote:

       “Don’t start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don’t try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember. You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first but kind of think of it when you aren’t doing it. Don’t think back over what you have done. Don’t think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the matter of detail—cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling. Don’t make telling follow a form.”

      Fortified with John Steinbeck’s advice I am starting my autobiography.

 (Much Ado About Me, Fred Allen, Little, Brown and Company, 1956)

     “You must write for children in the same way you do for adults, only better.” —Maxim Gorky 

     "Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry." --Robert Heinlein

    

    “When  you catch and adjective, kill it.” –Mark Twain

     “The best advice I’ve ever heard: Don’t write like you went to college.”—Alice Kahn

      “Most of the basic raw material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”—Willa Cather

"I rise at first light-the wars ruined my sleep, that and my thin eyelids-and I start by re-reading and editing everything I have written to the point I left off. That way I go through a book I'm writing several hundred times...Most writers slough off the toughest but most important part of their stuff, honing it and honing it until it gets an edge like the bullfighter's estoque, the killing sword."- Ernest Hemingway

      “My main reason for adapting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.” –George Bernard Shaw

      “There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous.”—Mark Twain

      “…Certain persons decide within themselves to become writers. When they have really made that decision it does not make much difference what else they do so long as they from that point on write something every day. Willy nilly, despite everything editors can do to prevent it, they will become arrived writers. If you haven’t got the guts for it, nothing you read and nothing you do will make you a writer.
     …And if you ask me what I mean when I say ‘if you’ve got the guts for it,’ all I can say is: YOU’LL SEE.” ---Jack Woodford

      William Goldman on telling his parents he was going to be a writer after college graduation:
     “So, you’re done with school now, Bill.”
     “That’s right.”
     So what’s next on the agenda?”
     Pause. Finally I would say it: “I want to be a writer.”
     And then they would pause. “A writer.”
     “I’d like to try.”
     Third and final pause. And then one of two inevitable replies: either
“What are you going to do next?” or “What are you really going to do?”

    “To write good prose naturally is to have a flair for expressing yourself simply…” –Jack Woodford 

     "Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action." --Ernest Hemingway

      “…You know, I try to write that way, just to have it sound as if I were speaking directly to the reader. To make my writing flow in a natural way, to go for it, like a Charlie Parker solo, straight from the heart, through the horn and out into the entire universe. That’s all I’m trying to do in all my work. The critics hate me for it…”---Jack Kerouac, as told to David Amram.

      “…Honesty in storytelling makes up for a great many stylistic faults, as the work shows, but lying is the great unrepairable fault…” –Stephen King

      “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”—Stephen King

     “If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts a I see them.” –Stephen King

     “...one can dazzle one’s students almost endlessly, or encourage one’s students to dazzle one another, with talk about allusion and symbol in the work of ingenious but minor writers. Subtly and insidiously, standards become perverted. ‘Good’ as an aesthetic judgment comes to mean ‘tricky,’ ‘academic,’ ‘obscure.’”—John Gardner

     “...the best writing is understated, meaning it's not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling..."--Gene Weingarten

"Don't ever quit. Never quit. Never show anybody you're hurt. Grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It will drive them up the wall. You always stay true to your own principles."--James Lee Burke in Writer's Digest.

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”—Dr. Samuel Johnson

     “…I was originally innocent of the promotional pitfalls and pratfalls. You could not then have persuaded me that a writer could appear in a bookstore, which weeks earlier had agreed to host an autographing session, to discover that its on-duty personnel not only had never heard of the author but had not a single copy of his book. Or that one might sit in a bookstore for two hours or more, gamely grinning behind a huge stack of his new book, while customers galoomped in to buy murder mysteries, cookbooks and how-to books, throwing a covert look toward the author and his stacked books and then scuttling away sideways like so many crabs escaping the firepot.”—Larry L. King

     “With a big ego and a dollar, a feller can buy a cup of coffee.” --- Ray Lacy

     “…The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.” ---Louis L’Amour

     “I am library educated.”—Ray Bradbury

     “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”—Anne Lamott

     “I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope.” —Stanley Elkins

      “There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.” —Edward Hoagland

     “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”—George Orwell

     “Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”—Red Smith

     “A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. That is too much of a temptation to the editor.”—Ring Lardner

     “Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do about it.”—Maxwell Perkins

     “Revise a lot. You can usually make it funnier.”—Dave Barry

      "Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."---Thomas Berger

     "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met."---Abraham Lincoln

     "In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."---Andre' Maurois

     "Marry money."---Max Shulman's advice to aspiring writers

     "In every fat book there is a thin book trying to get out."---unknown

     "If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing."---Kingsley Amis

     "The trouble with our younger writers is that they are all in their sixties."---W. Somerset Maugham

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

     "Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."---T.S. Eliot

       

     

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