Happy Friday! Phew—how was your week?
We had an awesome week filled with humbly helping and serving some incredibly creative, brilliant, and talented people to navigate the world of writing, publishing, and marketing. But sometimes…you just need some advice from the greats. The list below is compiled of some of the best quotes we know on writing and publishing from famous creatives. Enjoy!
- “To write is human, to edit is divine.” –Stephen King
- “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; the editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” –Mark Twain
- “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” –Ernest Hemingway
- “All I’m writing is just what I feel, that’s all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.” –Jimi Hendrix
- “My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.” -Anaïs Ni
- “Heartbreak can definitely give you a deeper sensibility for writing songs. I drew on a lot of heartbreak when I was writing my first album. I didn’t mean to but I just did.” –Adele
- “I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.” –Toni Morrison
- “Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.” –Amy Winehouse
- “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” -Sylvia Plath
- “Writing is hard work and bad for the health.” –E. B. White
- “And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me.” –Larry David
- “Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.” -Nicholas Sparks
- “Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.” –Alice Walker
- “The studios don’t seem to foster good writing. They’re not so interested in that, but they’re more interested in what worked most recently. They’re definitely very serious about making money, and that’s not a wrong thing, but you don’t have to make money the same way all the time.” –Bill Murray
- “When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.” –Ken Kesey
- “In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.” –Gore Vidal
- “And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.” –Sandra Cisneros
- “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” –Maya Angelou
- “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” -Neil Gaiman
- “Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have ‘essential’ and ‘long overdue’ meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance.” –J.K. Rowling
Writers, whose famed guidance do you follow when seeking advice on your craft?
Subscribe to the blog
Have every new post delivered to your inbox every time we publish a new article. Your email address will never be shared!
This was great, I stole a bunch for Twitter!
It’s long, but I really like this one:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” -Ira Glass