Aphorisms & Words Of Wisdom On The Craft Of Writing

I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.
Peter De Vries

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
Cynthia Heimel

It takes less time to learn how to write nobly than to write lightly and straight forwardly
Nietzsche

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
W. Somerset Maugham

The business of the novelist is not to chronicle great events but to make small ones interesting.
Schopenhauer

Writing is neither profession nor vocation, but an incurable illness. Those who give up are not writers and never were. Those who persevere do so not from pluck or determination but because they cannot help it. They are sick and advice is an impudence.
Hugh Leonard

The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.
Percy Lubbock

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style.
Borges

I never re-read what I’ve written; I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.
Borges

I do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.
Moliere

You cannot start a book with an intention, a calculation. You start writing before you know what you want to write, or what it is you’re doing.
E L Doctorow

Writing teachers invariably tell students, write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing. What did Kafka know? The insurance business? So that kind of advice is foolish because it presumes that you have to be able to go out to war to be able to do war. Well, some do and some don’t. I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
E.L. Doctorow

Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E L Doctorow

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over monstrous viny jungles toward untold wonders? That’s what you wanted to write about, about what you didn’t know. So, what mysterious time and place don’t you know?
Ken Kesey

As to plotting or thinking ahead, I don’t in a novel. I let it come page by page, one a day. Try and write out a scheme or plan and you will only depart from it. My way you have a chance of something living.
Henry Green

For God’s sake don’t do it unless you have to. It’s not easy. It shouldn’t be easy, but it shouldn’t be impossible - and it’s damn near impossible.
Frank Conroy

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.
Andre Gide

Everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else.
Georges Simenon

You can’t want to be a writer, you have to be one.
Paul Theroux

If you want to be true to life, start lying about it.
John Fowles

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly, but still attached, to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.
Frederic Raphael

Fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: people, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn’t a story.
Malcolm Cowley

A writer is not someone who expresses his thoughts, his passion or his imagination in sentences, but someone who thinks sentences. A Sentence-Thinker.
Roland Barthes

Writers are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Hemingway

A writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
Hemingway

The only tool a writer needs is a built-in shock-proof shit detector.
Hemingway

What is wrong with most writing today is its flaccidity, its lack of pleasure in the manipulation of sounds and pauses. The written word is becoming inert. One dreads to think what it will be like in 2020.
Anthony Burgess

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out into the yard and shot it.
Truman Capote

I truly do not care about a book once it is finished. Any money or fame that results has no connection with my feeling for the book.
Steinbeck

I don’t know about method. That what is so much more important than the how.
Ezra Pound

When they come, I write them; when they don’t, I don’t.
Kerouac

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, both past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
Nabokov