by Leo Wiles
11 December 2015
Holiday seasons can seem to be bleak times for a freelancer if the phone stops ringing and the email commissions dry up. So, we’ve compiled some quirky writer quotes to keep your mojo this Christmas!
“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Christopher Columbus
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
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.” Philip Roth
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” Neil Gaiman
“To guarantee success act as if it were impossible to fail.” Dorothea Brande
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The more scared we are about our calling the more sure we can be that we have to do it.” Stephen Pressfield
“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.” Robert Benchley
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Douglas Adams
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” Stephen King
“To live a creative life you must lose the fear of being wrong.” Joseph Chilton Pearce
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Thomas Mann
“I hate writing, I love having written.” Dorothy Parker
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.” Robert A. Heinlein
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Ernest Hemingway
“The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath
“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.” Christopher Hitchens
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” Thomas Jefferson
“A word after a word after a word is power.” Margaret Atwood
“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” Friedrich Nietzsche
“Your intuition knows what to write so get out of the way.” Ray Bradbury
“Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.” Ann Patchett
“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
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Aristotle
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” Saul Bellow
“If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” Martin Luther
“Write like a motherfucker.” Cheryl Strayed
“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” Isaac Asimov
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” Richard Bach
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” Annie Proulx
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” Jules Renard
“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” Franz Kafka
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” Robert Frost
“What separated the talented from the successful is a lot of hard work.” Stephen King
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” E.L. Doctorow
“The first draft of anything is shit.” Ernest Hemingway
“Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you’re working. Tell them it’s research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.” Jennifer Weiner
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” Kurt Vonnegut
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