More advice and observations from novelists and other writers.
- “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless ― there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” ― Ernest Hemingway
- “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
- “The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. ‘Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk,’ he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” ― Dominick Dunne
- “Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.” ― Blake Morrison
- “Half my life is an act of revision.” ― John Irving
- “I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” ― Truman Capote
- “It is perfectly okay to write garbage ― as long as you edit brilliantly.” ― C. J. Cherryh
- “I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff
- “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’.” ― Mark Twain
- “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” ― Dr. Seuss
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