Now we know why some writers drink!

23 Dec, 2023

There is a stereotype out there about writers. They're talented and frustrated and hit the bottle way too often. Maybe the reason some talented writers are frustrated and drink to excess is because of what they're asked to write. Example:

Why Writers Drink

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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023May 9, 2025

There is a stereotype out there about writers. They’re talented and frustrated and hit the bottle way too often. Maybe the reason Read More...

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.

William C. Gault

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.