Marianne Moore
“My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”
Elmore Leonard
“Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”
Colette
“Half my life is an act of revision.”
John Irving
“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.”
John Steinbeck
“Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: As much neurosis as the child can bear.”
W.H. Auden
“Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.”
Stanislaw J. Lec