Chris Rogers, Author

Favorite Writers' Quotes

“I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.” – John Steinbeck

“Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness. You should always write with an erection. Even if you’re a woman.” – Tom Robbins

“You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It’s in your blood, but you’re not concerned with it anymore.” – Tom Robbins

“The world needs writers. We will always be necessary. There are few professions that can claim that distinction.” – Rod McKuen

“A poet can’t afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.” – Rod McKuen

“If I can be writing, I can take a certain amount of control when so much around me is upsetting.” – Carolyn Chute

“There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.” – James Dickey

“What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.” – James Dickey

“If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.” – Norman Mailer

“You’re gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.” – Norman Mailer

“I realized that I might not ever make it as a writer, that it might be because I wasn’t good enough, or that it might be because the odds were just too long.” – Jay McInerney

“The only sensible approach is not to take it too seriously. What counts is the writing.” – Jay McInerney

“There’s a waltz scene in Oh, Dad, and I was actually waltzing while I wrote it.” – Arthur Kopit

“It’s much much more than just feeling that you have something to say.” – Arthur Kopit

“For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just what your’re feeling.” – May Sarton

“The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.” – May Sarton

“You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and what-all. If you write beautifully, you can write beautifully.” – Rod Serling

“A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.” – William Faulkner

“Jokes have to be quite naked to be understood. They have to be quite simple.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don’t think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.” – Ellen Goodman

“You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.” – Ellen Goodman

“I write a thousand words a day. Nothing will stop me, I mean nothing, until the book is finished. I’m disciplined in spite of myself.” – Joseph Wambaugh

“I was never a wet-eyed, passionate writer; I was always a policeman.” – Joseph Wambaugh

“The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise.” – Truman Capote

“I used to throw things out, saying, ‘This isn’t great.’ It didn’t occur to me that it didn’t have to be great.” – William Saroyan

“I had tears coming out of my eyes. And it was the characters that got me there.” – Jean Auel

“I had half a million words, but it wasn’t a story.” – Jean Auel

“If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.” – James Michener

“Contrary to what people think, I slave over my books.” – James Michener

“Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.” – Nikki Giovanni

“My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.” – Erica Jong

“If you write a hundred short stories and they are bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.” – Ray Bradbury

“You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.” – Ray Bradbury

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” – Allen Ginsberg

“I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.” – Red Smith

“Any sportswriter who thinks the world is no bigger than the outfield fence in not only a bad citizen, but also a lousy sportswriter.” – Red Smith

“Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.” – Ernest Hemingway

“There’s literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn’t otherwise have.” – Raymond Carver

“There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.” – Raymond Carver

“It really comes down to this: indifference to everything except that piece of paper in the typewriter.” – Raymond Carver

“I’m nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it’s all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.” – Harlan Ellison

“The life of a creative artist is very tenuous. You never know when it’s over, and you always have that sense of panic. You always continue to think, ‘Jesus Christ, what if I don’t get this done? What if I’ve written my last book?’ So if you begin to take yourself too seriously, it can be very dangerous.” — William Goldman

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” – Rudyard Kipling

“I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.” – Sherwood Anderson

“The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“…I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.” – William Faulkner

“ The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.” – Ernest Hemingway

“… a writer is working when he’s staring out the window.” — William Saroyan

“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.” – Mark Twain

“My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.” – Dylan Thomas

“I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health.” — Noel Coward

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.” – Margaret Mitchell

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience…” – Alfred North Whitehead

“You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.” – William Saroyan

“A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.” – Aristotle, The Poetics

“(When I’m stuck...) I talk to myself on paper about my characters – sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.” – Phyllis A. Whitney

“Every man has three characters – that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.” – Alphonse Karr

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.” – H.G. Wells

“Common looking people are the best in the world…” – Abraham Lincoln

“The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.” – Frederich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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