DD

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth

 

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King

 

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold

 

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD

 

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs

 

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, WD

 

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell

 

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD

 

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

 

“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.”
—George Orwell

 

“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
—Roald Dahl, WD

 

“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley

 

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

 

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
—Virginia Woolf