#18. Motivation. Writers on writing.

Stephen King: I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Ernest Hemingway:  Write drunk, edit sober.

Hunter S. Thompson:  The only thing to be said this time about Fear & Loathing is that it was fun to write and that’s fair, for me at least because I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. 

Elmore Leonard:  I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

Isaac Asimov:  If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I’d type a little faster.  

Moliere:  A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. 

William Faulkner:  Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

Robert Frost:  Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.

Flannery O’Connor:  Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

Robert Benchley:  It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

George Orwell:  In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Steven Wright:  I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography. 

William S. Burroughs:  In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

Gustave Flaubert:  The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.