“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

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American author 1947

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“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. […] If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.”

Natalie Goldberg book Writing Down the Bones

Essay, "Listening". p.59
Writing Down the Bones (1986)

“The thing about writing in America—and I just recently understood this—is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it’s the wrong thing. It’s not a profession. A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can’t do anything else, and then you have another job. I’m always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something. If you just sit there, and you’re a writer, you’re bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals. Writing is not a profession. It’s a calling. It’s almost holy…”

Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer

On her views of writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)

“I'm not sure I'd want to pick the brain of any author. Some writers have a lot to say about what they write and why they write it. Others don't. I've met a lot of writers who have an awful lot to say in the bar, but whose books seem curiously empty.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

“Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

“Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to L.A. Avilova (February 26, 1899)
Letters

“Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.”

Ngaio Marsh (1895–1982) New Zealand writer

Source: Death on the Air and Other Stories

“I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Source: Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez

“A lot of the TV shows, they do long hours, and they do a lot of days, and you don't get a lot of time. But the good thing is, if you get one that's made in L.A., or made in a place you want to be, you get to go home every night.”

Jason Statham (1967) English actor, film producer, martial artist and former diver

“If you write a lot of programs, and you're used to squeezing them all the time, you find that it's easy to write a program that's simple. A lot of it is having a clear sense of what you want to say — writing the proof by choosing what to prove, and being clear about that. In programming, a lot of simplicity comes from knowing what matters and what doesn't matter.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

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