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Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Sep 10, 2025
The Revelation was my master's project, and after I finished it, I thought I'd send it off to a publisher and within a year or so be a rich and famous writer. Two years later I finally sold it. For a whopping $4,000. A year after that, it finally came out. Which explains why there are all those terrible jobs on my resume!
Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you’re dead, you’ll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren’t holding any paper.
I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.
If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?
I learned that famous writers are people with foibles like anyone else and this helped me realize reaching their level of notoriety wasn't impossible.
I would want to travel the world and write about it. To be a famous writer.
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.
Read, read read. Read everything.
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.
That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.
If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.
I know of only one country, at least to my knowledge, which has a dissident culture where leading figures, I mean, the most famous writers, journalists, academics and so on, are not only critical of state policy, but are constantly carrying out civil disobedience and risking imprisonment and often being imprisoned, standing up for people's rights. That's Turkey.
The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.
The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. You know, my fantasy of being a famous writer, and again there's a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Finally and most important of all, authenticity means that you must do what you do the way you do it and allow everyone else the same courtesy. There was a time I wanted to be like every famous writer that ever lived. I tried to copy styles, reframe information, use similar artwork. I almost drove myself crazy! Now I just do what I do. I have mentors. There are people whose work I admire, but I write the way I write. I eat the way I eat. I dress the way I dress. I can't believe that God made us each so unique only to have us do everything the same way.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
SURE-FIRE SINGLES AD: Famous Writer needs woman to organize his life and spend his money. Loves to turn off Sunday football and go to the Botanical Gardens with that special someone. Will obtain plastic surgery if necessary.
As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.