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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023June 4, 2026 1195

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

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

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Roald Dahl

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

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

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

M. K. Simmons

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

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

T.S. Eliot

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.