Advice for writing

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.
Susan Orlean

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
George Orwell

What you don’t know would make a great book.
Sydney Smith

I write to discover what I know.
Flannery O’Connor

Popular magazines inculcate a careless and deplorable style which is hard to unlearn, and which impedes the acquisition of a purer style. If such things must be read, let them be skimmed over as lightly as possible. An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible.
H.P. Lovecraft

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!
William Faulkner

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
Cormac McCarthy

You must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King

Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where I think it should in most cases remain.
Christopher Hitchens

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou

Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Zadie Smith

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.
Henry Miller

Don’t save anything.
James Salter

I had learnt already never to empty the well of my writing.
Ernest Hemingway

One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
Émile Zola

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
Douglas Adams

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
Saul Bellow

I don’t believe in writing at night because it comes too easily.
Günter Grass

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
Gustave Flaubert

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronising.
E.B. White

Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can’t be done abruptly.
Colm Tóibín

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