Move to New York City. Get married. Buy an incredibly expensive apartment. Have children, a dog, a second home in the country. Lease an imported luxury automobile. Come the first of the month, I promise, you will have no problem writing.
BRUCE FEIRSTEIN
Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.
LAFCADIO HEARN
Deliberately puzzling or confusing a reader may keep him reading for a while, but at too great an expense. Even just an “aura” of mystery in a story is usually just a lot of baloney. Who are these people? What are they up to? Provoking such questions from a reader can be a writer’s way of deferring exposition until he feels the reader is ready for the explanation of it all. But more likely it’s just fogging things up. A lot of beginning writers’ fiction is like a lot of beginners’ poetry: deliberately unintelligible so as to make the shallow seem deep.
RUST HILLS
The best playwrights—Tennesse Williams, for instance—will punctuate the most serious moment with an outrageous laugh. The audience delights in it. They need the relief. They need laughter. . . . The more an audience laughs, the more it feels. Shakespeare knew this—there’s comedy in his most serious plays.
JEROME LAWRENCE
You can’t tell or show everything within the compass of a book. If you try to tell or show everything, your reader will die of boredom before the end of the first page. You must, therefore, ask yourself what is the core of the matter you wish to communicate to your reader? Having decided on the core of the matter, all that you tell him must relate to it and illustrate it more and more vividly.
MORRIS L. WEST
I think what's most disturbing about success is that it's very hazardous to your health, as well as to your daily routine. Not only are there intrusions on your time, but there is a kind of corrosion of your own humility and sense of necessary workmanship. You get the idea that anything you do is in some way marvelous.
JOHN UPDIKE
Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Most people quit. If you don’t quit, if you rewrite, if you keep publishing in fancier places, you will understand that “What’s the secret?” is not the question, which is, “Are you having fun?”
ROBERT LIPSYTE
It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it’s just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you’re going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job.
ROSELLEN BROWN
Nouns, verbs, are the workhorses of language. Especially in dialogue, don’t say, “she said mincingly,” or “he said boisterously.” Just say, “he said, she said.”
JOHN P. MARQUAND
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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