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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023May 9, 2025 475

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:

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

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

C. J. Cherryh

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

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

Gloria Steinem

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

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

Jim Morrison

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

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

Michael Burke

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

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