As you’ve been perusing this site you’ve no doubt seen several mentions of my ongoing pursuit of a professional writing career. With a poetry book out and a novel finished I hope that dream is closer to becoming a reality. But it is no easy thing to make a living by telling stories born of your own heart and mind. Discouragement is as common a thing to a write as the dawn is to the sun. In those times I like to seek out some of my heroes for their take on a struggle I know we have shared. And I thought that their words would be the perfect ones to share in this the first edition of Wily Wordplay. So in no particular order here they are, ten of my favorite quotes about writing:
- “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
- “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain
- “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin
- “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow
- “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
- “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow
- “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
- “Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf
- “All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche