Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
HENRY GREEN
Procrastination is available at your fingertips, the whole vast www world. Cat videos, vicious gossip about pop stars, survivalist blogs, right-wing paranoia, it’s all there. The Internet brought the barroom, the porn shop, the fleabag hotel lobby and the men’s locker room into every American home, and you can now hang out with ne’er-do-wells to your heart’s content without anybody knowing about it.
GARRISON KEILLOR
Most humor depends on specificity. It’s funnier to say that a cheese steak tastes better when you’re leaning up against a Pontiac than when you are leaning up against a car.
CALVIN TRILLIN
Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the “I'm a Fraud' phase.” You go through the “I'll Never Finish” phase. And every once in a while you think, “What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it's received as such?”
LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies. Too late!
JOYCE CAROL OATES
By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.
LOUISE ERDRICH
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
NEIL GAIMAN
Humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers, for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting too.
T.C. BOYLE
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
WILLIAM STRUNK, JR. and E.B. WHITE
Leonardo said that small rooms concentrate the mind. I find that I like working in small, cramped rooms with not much in them, as compared to a pretty studio.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2026. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.