Category Archives: Quotes About Writing

A Good Author is Never Hard to Find

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I have a gift for you.  One of Flannery O’Connor’s more famous short stories was A Good Man is Hard to Find, written in 1953. It’s about a selfish woman – a grandmother – who finds redemption at the hands of a killer, known at The Misfit, just at the point where he shoots her in the chest. Like most of O’Connor’s writings, there is a moral magnitude to the message, somewhere within the violence. It’s a vivid read.

My favorite line in the story was of course, this one:
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Oh yes, that gift I mentioned earlier? It’s a 1959 audio mp3 of Flannery O’Connor herself reading  A Good Man is Hard to Find.  Click on this LINK to go to the site.

In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. It gave me goosebumps to hear her voice telling the story of a family’s trip that ends in disaster and redemption.

Thank you to the OPEN CULTURE website, where I found this nugget. I suggest you check them out, because they have such interesting stuff, like William Faulkner reading his Nobel Prize speech,  or a video clip of Louis Armstrong on The Johnny Cash Show (yes, Johnny Cash hosted a musical variety show from 1969 to 1971!)

And to close out, here are some quotes from Flannery O’Connor:

  • I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
  • All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
  • I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
  • When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business
  • The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

Writing Advice from Stephen King and Oscar Wilde

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Imagine being in a writing class with Stephen King and Oscar Wilde. What a class that would be….  To get the unique flavor of this unprecedented class, here are some quotes from these authors.


“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde

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“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing

“This morning, I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.”
― Oscar Wilde

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“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

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“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”
― Oscar Wilde

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“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
― Stephen King

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“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
― Stephen King

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
― Oscar Wilde

From the Mouth of Oscar Wilde…

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Oscar Wilde is an Irish Poet, Novelist, Dramatist and Critic who lived from 1854 to 1900. For some reason, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) has been one of my favorite reads. Something about the mask vs the true being fascinates me. Oscar led a wild life (sorry, couldn’t help the pun), going to prison and dying destitue in Paris at the age of forty-six. But, his genius lives on and on.

BTW, his complete name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde...how could he not end up as a poet and dramatist with a name like that?

Here are some quotes from him that even today could relate to modern writers:

Art never expresses anything but itself.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

And I leave you with this last quote from Oscar Wilde:

All great ideas are dangerous.

Writing As Heaven, Writing As Hell!

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Writing as Heaven Viewpoint:

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling

Every word written is a victory against death.
Michel Butor

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.
James T. Farrell

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Lord Byron

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes

Writers aren’t exactly people… they’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing as Hell Viewpoint: 

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
Jorge Luis Borges

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer – and if so, why?
Bennett Cerf

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert A. Heinlein

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Red Smith

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
Truman Capote

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
John Dos Passos

It’s all how you see it: Heaven or Hell…which is it for you? Or maybe it’s both, in which case, it explains why writers tend to be a bit nuts!

A Writing Primate

How Other Authors Feel About Rejection…

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I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

—James Herriot

I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of – or I did have – drawers full of rejection slips. 

—Fred Saberhagen

“I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’”

— Saul Bellow

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

—Margaret Atwood

If you don’t write, there will be NO rejection slips, but then again, if you don’t write, then you are NOT a writer.
—A Writing Primate
Please feel free to add your own favorite quote about rejection in the Reply section.

Re-Write Madness.

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Every Good Dog Jumps Over the Moon

All Good Dog Jumps Over the Moon

All Good Dogs Jumps Over the Moon

All Good Dogs Jump Over the Moon

All Good Dogs Hump Over the Moon

A Dog Humps Over the Moon

A Dog Humps the Moon

Damn Dog Humping Again.

————————– or as the quote says below—————————————-

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.
Alan Dean Foster