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Now we know why some writers drink!

December 23, 2023May 9, 2025 767

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

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

Jodi Picoult

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

G.K. Chesterton

The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

Douglas Adams

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

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

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

M. K. Simmons

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

Edward Albee

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

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

Gloria Steinem

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

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

Steven Bochco

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

Mickey Spillane

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

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

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

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

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.