Words of wisdom from famous writers

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
- Stephen King

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
- Ernest Hemingway

It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
- Ernest Hemingway

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
- Mark Twain

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
- William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
- Somerset Maugham

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
- Herman Melville

It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
- C. J. Cherryh

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

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
- Ray Bradbury

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

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
- Henry David Thoreau

If you have other things in your life—family, friends, good productive day work—these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
- David Brin

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

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
- Ray Bradbury

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
- Willa Cather

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
- Douglas Adams

Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
- Ayn Rand

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

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

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
- Philip K. Dick

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
- Russell Baker

Half my life is an act of revision.
- John Irving

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.
- Harlan Ellison