“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
Jackie Collins (1937–2015) British-American novelist and writer
Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 10, Writing About People: The Interview, p. 70.
“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
Jackie Collins (1937–2015) British-American novelist and writer
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.
“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”
Alan Dean Foster (1946) American fiction writer
Edvin Kanka Cudic (1988) Human rights defender
Miloš Urošević, as quoted in May '92 (2012) p.19
About
Frank Chin (1940) American writer
On the writing process in ““FRANK CHIN: HIS OWN VOICE” https://resisters.com/by-frank-abe/frank-chin-his-own-voice/ in the Bloombury Review (September 1991)
“1) Writers who write for other writers should write letters.”
Larry Niven (1938) American writer
Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers
Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon
Hemingway's famous iceberg theory of writing.
Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
Geling Yan (1958) Chinese writer and screenwriter
Source: "Yan Geling: I Am Also A Person In The Cave" https://www.bannedbook.org/en/bnews/lifebaike/20211010/1635954.html (10 October 2021)
Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer
(10 January 2005)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005
Context: The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she — the author — should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.