16 Auhors Share The Challenges And Pain Of Writing

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

William Faulkner

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read."

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.”

Isaac Asimov

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it”

Roald Dahl

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”

Ernest Hemingway

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”

Franz Kafka

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”

Ray Bradbury

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”

Vladimir Nabokov

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay."

Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Write about the emotions you fear the most.”

Laurie Halse Anderson

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