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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023May 9, 2025 337

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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A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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

Michael Burke

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

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 took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

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

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

Mickey Spillane

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Steven Bochco

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

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

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