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Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected

Wisdom of Great Writers
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Orwell,
and other literary icons.

BY M AR IA PO POVA

By popular demand, Ive put together a periodically

updated reading list of all the famous advice on
writing presented here over the years, featuring words
of wisdom from such masters of the craft as Kurt
Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Stephen King,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean, Ernest Hemingway,
Zadie Smith, and more.

Please enjoy.

1. Marilynne Robinson: Beauty, Writing,

What Storytelling Can Learn from Science,
and the Splendors of Uncertainty
We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to
orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.
2. Stephen King: Writing and the Art of Creative Sleep:
In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we
are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our
daytime lives.
3. Elmore Leonards 10 Rules of Writing
If it sounds like writing rewrite it.
4. Michael Lewis: Writing, Money, and the Necessary Self-Delusion of
Creativity
When youre trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking
goes a long way.
5. Annie Dillard on Writing
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed
to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back,
your brain, and then and only then it is handed to you.
6. Susan Sontag on Writing

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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if
you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
7. Ray Bradbury: How List-Making Can Boost Your Creativity
How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the
top of your skull.
8. Anne Lamott: Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep
you cramped and insane your whole life.
9. Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Letters
To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to
the depths of your being what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but
only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.
10. Ernest Hemingway : Writing, Knowledge, and the Danger of Ego
All bad writers are in love with the epic.
11. David Foster Wallace: Writing, Death, and Redemption
You dont have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships
and loneliness has to do with angst about death, the recognition that Im going
to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily
on without me.
12. Isabel Allende: Writing Brings Order to the Chaos of Life
Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.
13. Stephen King: The Adverb Is Not Your Friend
I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the
rooftops.
14. Malcolm Cowley: The Four Stages of Writing
The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing
situation or mood.
15. Henry Millers 11 Commandments of Writing
Work on one thing at a time until finished.
16. Advice on Writing: Collected Wisdom from Modernitys Greatest Writers
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep
between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
17. Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Rules for a Great Story
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the
world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
18. Susan Orlean on Writing
You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you
love it.
19. Zadie Smith: 10 Rules of Writing
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign
yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
20. John Steinbeck: 6 Tips on Writing, and a Disclaimer
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
21. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Secret of Great Writing (1938)
Nothing any good isnt hard.
22. E. B. White: Egoism and the Art of the Essay
Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the
stamina to write essays
23. E. B. White: Why Brevity Is Not the Gold Standard for Style
Writing is not an exercise in excision, its a journey into sound.
24. Ray Bradbury: Creative Purpose in the Face of Rejection

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The blizzard doesnt last forever; it just seems so.

25. Mary Karr: The Magnetism and Madness of the Written Word
Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
26. Kurt Vonnegut: How to Write With Style and the 8 Keys to the Power of the
Written Word (1985)
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not
know what is interesting and what is not.
27. Ann Patchett: What Now?
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are
connected.
28. Mary Gordon: The Joy of Notebooks and Writing by Hand as a Creative
Catalyst
However thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit
a corporeal world.
29. H. P. Lovecraft: Advice to Aspiring Writers (1920)
A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of
rules, whilst a story of Poes will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of
powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a
bulky textbook.
30. Henry Miller: Reflections on Writing
Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living
blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.
31. Margaret Atwood: 10 Rules of Writing
Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
32. David Foster Wallace: The Nature of the Fun and Why Writers Write
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth
instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure
you will be maximally likable.
33. Joy Williams: Why Writers Write
A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
34. Joan Didion: Ego, Grammar, and the Impetus to Write
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have
been no reason to write.
35. David Ogilvy: 10 No-Bullshit Tips on Writing
Never write more than two pages on any subject.
36. George Orwell: The Four Motives for Writing (1946)
Sheer egoism Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists,
politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen in short, with the whole
top crust of humanity.
37. Ezra Pound: A Few Donts for Those Beginning to Write Verse (1913)
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent
for a new soap.
38. Ray Bradbury: Storytelling and Human Nature (1963)
Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.
39. Joseph Conrad: Writing and the Role of the Artist (1897)
Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
40. Helen Dunmore: 9 Rules of Writing
A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
41. E. B. White: The Role and Responsibility of the Writer (1969)
Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
42. Jack Kerouac: 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life

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No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.

43. Raymond Chandler on Writing
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should
by the rules be dated.
44. Walter Benjamin: The Writers Technique in Thirteen Theses
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely
developed it will be on surrendering itself.
45. 28-Year-Old Susan Sontag on the Four People a Great Writer Must Be
A great writer has all 4 but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.
46. 10 Tips on Writing from Joyce Carol Oates
Dont try to anticipate an ideal reader or any reader. He/she might exist
but is reading someone else.
47. Neil Gaiman: 8 Rules of Writing
Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
48. Anas Nin: Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Writing and Creativity
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great
loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
49. Neil Gaimans Advice to Aspiring Writers
You have to finish things thats what you learn from, you learn by finishing
things.
50. Jorge Luis Borges on Writing: Wisdom from His Most Candid Interviews
A writers work is the product of laziness.
51. Herbert Spencer: The Philosophy of Style, the Economy of Attention, and
the Ideal Writer (1852)
To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.
52. Charles Bukowski on Writing and His Insane Daily Routine
Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up,
goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.
53. Samuel Johnson on Writing and Creative Doggedness
Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady
perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from
which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
54. Edgar Allan Poe: The Joy of Marginalia and What Handwriting Reveals
about Character
In the marginalia we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly
boldly originally with abandonment without conceit.
55. Kurt Vonnegut: The Writers Responsibility, the Limitations of the Brain,
and Why the Universe Exists: A Rare 1974 WNYC Interview
We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute
wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
56. Ernest Hemingway on Not Writing for Free and How to Run a First-Rate
Publication
Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.
57. How to Be a Writer: Ernest Hemingways Advice to Aspiring Authors
As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.
58. Eudora Welty: The Poetics of Place and Writing as an Explorers Map of the
Unknown
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
59. Alice Munros Nobel Prize Interview: Writing, Women, and the Rewards of
Storytelling
I want my stories to move people to feel some kind of reward from the

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writing.
60. Samuel Delany: Good Writing vs. Talented Writing
Talented writing makes things happen in the readers mind vividly, forcefully
that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesnt.
61. William Faulkner: Writing, the Purpose of Art, Working in a Brothel, and
the Meaning of Life
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and
whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
62. Anas Nin: Writing, the Future of the Novel, and How Keeping a Diary
Enhances Creativity: Wisdom from a Rare 1947 Chapbook
It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves
most accurately.
63. John Updike: Writing and Death
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead.
So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
64. Charles Bukowski Debunks the Tortured Genius Myth of Creativity
unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and
your gut, dont do it.
65. Mary Gaitskill: Why Writers Write and The Six Motives of Creativity
The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and
response.
66. Vladimir Nabokov: Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great
Storyteller Must Have
Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a
shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
67. Joan Didion: Telling Stories, the Economy of Words, Starting Out as a
Writer, and Facing Rejection
Short stories demand a certain awareness of ones own intentions, a certain
narrowing of the focus.
68. Herman Melvilles Daily Routine and Thoughts on the Writing Life
A book in a mans brain is better off than a book bound in calf at any rate it
is safer from criticism.
69. William Faulkners Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech: The Writer as a Booster
of the Human Heart
The poets, the writers, duty is to help man endure by lifting his heart.
70. John Updike: Making Money, How to Have a Productive Daily Routine, and
the Most Important Things for Aspiring Writers to Know
In a country this large and a language even larger there ought to be a living
for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
71. Susan Sontag : Writing, Routines, Education, and Elitism in a 1992
Recording from the 92Y Archives
To make your life being a writer, its an auto-slavery you are both the slave
and the task-master.
72. Chinua Achebe: The Meaning of Life and the Writers Responsibility in
Society
The difference between blind optimism and the urge to improve the worlds
imperfection.
73. Leonard Cohen: Creativity, Hard Work, and Why You Should Never Quit
Before You Know What It Is Youre Quitting
The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.
74. Ray Bradbury: What Failure Really Means, Why We Hate Work, and the

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Importance of Love in Creative Endeavors

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of
success and failure.
75. Joyce Carol Oates: What Hemingways Early Stories Can Teach Us About
Writing and the Defining Quality of Great Art
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
76. Willa Cather: Writing Through Troubled Times
The test of ones decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has
stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people
they wanted to please.
77. Anthony Trollope: Witty and Wise Advice on How to Be a Successful Writer
My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The
man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose,
will work the best.
78. William Styron: Why Formal Education Is a Waste of Time for Writers
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write like myself college is
useless beyond the Sophomore year.
79. Madeleine LEngle: Creativity, Censorship, Writing, and the Duty of
Childrens Books
We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness
and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil,
well likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.
80. Saul Bellow: How Writers and Artists Save Us from the Moronic Inferno
of Our Time
The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at
times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.
81. Mary Oliver: The Mystery of the Human Psyche, the Secret of Great Poetry,
and How Rhythm Makes Us Come Alive
Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a
pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.
82. Schopenhauer on Style
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the
deeper is the impression it makes.
83. Flannery OConnor: Why the Grotesque Appeals to Us, Plus a Rare
Recording of Her Reading
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands
the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to
be restored.
84. Annie Dillard: The Art of the Essay and Narrative Nonfiction vs. Poetry and
Short Stories
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
85. C.S. Lewis: The 3 Ways of Writing for Children and the Key to Authenticity
in All Writing
The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the
whole cast of the authors mind.
86. Nietzsche: 10 Rules for Writers
Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but
also feels it.
87. William Faulkner: Writing, the Human Dilemma, and Why We Create
Its the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never
can quite do it as well as you want to, so theres always something to wake up

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tomorrow morning to do.

88. David Foster Wallace: The Redemptive Power of Reading and the Future of
Writing in the Age of Information
The fun of reading as an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human
beings to talk to each other about stuff we cant normally talk about.
89. Zadie Smith: The Psychology of the Two Types of Writers
Its a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think
sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and
a half hours after you write the final word.
90. George Orwell: Writing, How to Counter the Mindless Momentum of
Language, and the Four Questions a Great Writer Must Ask Herself
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at
the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for
yourself.
91. Italo Calvino: The Art of Quickness, Digression as a Hedge Against Death,
and the Key to Great Writing
Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result
from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search for the
sentence in which every word is unalterable.
92. Ursula K. Le Guin: Where Ideas Come From, the Secret of Great Writing,
and the Trap of Marketing Your Work
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard
and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
93. Gabriel Garca Mrquez on His Unlikely Beginnings as a Writer
If youre going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones After all,
there are better ways to starve to death.
94. Roald Dahl: How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His
Bedridden Mentor
I doubt I would have written a line unless some minor tragedy had sort of
twisted my mind out of the normal rut.
95. Robert Frost: How to Read Intelligently and Write a Great Essay
The sidelong glance is what you depend on.
96. Lewis Carroll: How to Work Through Difficulty and His Three Tips for
Overcoming Creative Block
When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a
thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on.
97. Mark Strand: The Heartbeat of Creative Work and the Artists Task to Bear
Witness to the Universe
Its such a lucky accident, having been born, that were almost obliged to pay
attention.
98. John Steinbeck: The Diary as a Tool of Discipline, a Hedge Against
Self-Doubt, and a Pacemaker for the Heartbeat of Creative Work
Just set one days work in front of the last days work. Thats the way it comes
out. And thats the only way it does.
99. E.B. White: How to Write for Children and the Writers Responsibility to
All Audiences
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to
write up, not down.
100. Virginia Woolf: Writing and Self-Doubt
Consolation for those moments when you cant tell whether youre the divinest
genius or the greatest fool in the world.

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101. Cheryl Strayed: Faith, Humility, and the Art of Motherfuckitude

Writing is hard for every last one of us Coal mining is harder. Do you think
miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They
do not. They simply dig.
102. Ann Patchett: Writing and Why Self-Forgiveness Is the Most Important
Ingredient of Great Art
The ability to forgive oneself is the key to making art, and very possibly the
key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.
103. Umberto Ecos Advice to Writers
If we think that our reader is an idiot, we should not use rhetorical figures, but if
we use them and feel the need to explain them, we are essentially calling the
reader an idiot. In turn, he will
104. Grace Paley: The Value of Not Understanding Everything
Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.
105. Jane Kenyon: Some of the Wisest Words to Create and Live By
Be a good steward of your gifts.

Published May 3, 2013

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