Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN
Here's what you need to know before you agree to be a “co-author” for a celebrity or "expert":
1. Your “collaborator,” no matter how famous, will have a lot less expertise than promised, and you will have to do a great deal of research for which you'll receive neither credit nor compensation.
2. Your collaborator will not understand what writing involves, or how long it takes, or that a second draft is not a final draft (never show your collaborator a first draft) or that reading a chapter and making suggestions is not the same as writing it in the first place.
3. You and your collaborator will both believe that the work—and hence the money—has been unfairly divided.
4. In short, an amicable divorce is easier to pull off than a happy collaboration.
NANCY HATHAWAY
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.
JANET FITCH
I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I will tell you something about stories. They aren't just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories.
LESLIE MARMON SILKO
I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.
DORIS LESSING
I think a writer is not an ideal husband. . . . Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they’re living with, or they get irritable with the people that they’re living with when the people insist on being noticed.
ROY BLOUNT, JR.
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
JOHN UPDIKE
When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe you up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it’s got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you’ve done all ties up. But it’s a very, very long, slow process.
ROALD DAHL
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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