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Writing

17 Great Authors Who Wrote While Standing

by jaredbrock

“At the first symptoms of indigestion, book-keepers, entry-clerks, authors, and editors should get a telescope-desk. Literary occupations need not necessarily involve sedentary habits…” 
— Dr. Felix Oswald, Popular Science 1883

I wrote my first (now-published) book in just 3.5 weeks. It was 113,000 words, accomplished in 12–14 hours marathon sessions at a tiny desk in a Boston attic. In the end, my left butt cheek seized and I had to walk it off for days.

It was a bit of a wake-up call, to say the least. Since Apple CEO Tim Cook cautioned that “sitting is the new cancer”, I’ve made a habit of getting elevated regularly. (Yes, I’m typing these words while standing!)

Perhaps surprisingly, standing to write isn’t a new idea. For those of us who typically envision writers hunched over typewriters, the reality is that many of our favorite authors also suffered from “numb bum” and took to standing to pen their pretty prose.

Setting aside standing desk users like journalists Edward R. Murrow and Kate White, musical composers including Wagner, Hammerstein, and Brahms, and political figures such as Otto von Bismarck, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Napoleon, here are seventeen writers to give you the inspiration to stand up and write!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”
— Longfellow

When I visited his incredible house in Boston, I was pleased to discover that Longfellow alternated between standing and sitting at the same desk.

Ernest Hemingway

“Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”
—
Hemingway

“He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu — the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him … moving only to shift weight from one foot to another.”
— George Plimpton

Winston Churchill

“Perfecting and selling your writing is a lifelong task. If you are a persistent writer, you can expect your abilities to improve with time. Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
—
Churchill

Saul Bellow

“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
—
Bellow

Friedrich Nietzsche

“I am writing this at my standing desk, which is against the window. The window offers a pleasant prospect over the lime trees and sun-bathed hills — delightful natural scenery.”
—
Nietzche, in letter to his sister

Charles Dickens

“Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up…”
—
Dickens

“…Books all round, up to the ceiling and down to the ground; a standing desk at which he writes; and all manner of comfortable easy chairs.”
—
Visitor describing Dickens’s workspace

Benjamin Franklin

“…I am too much harassed by a variety of correspondence together with gout and gravel, which induces me to postpone doing what I often fully intend to do, and particularly writing, where the urgent necessity of business does not seem to require its being done immediately; my sitting too much at the desk having already almost killed me…”
—
Franklin

Soren Kirkegaard

“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.”
—
Kirkegaard

“Kierkegaard’s extravagant house-fortress with many rooms, each of them containing a standing desk, so that the wandering writer should jot down his ideas whenever they visited him.”
— Svetlana Boym

Vladimir Nabokov

“The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.”
—
Nabokov

“Nabokov would be back at his desk by one-thirty and work steadily until six-thirty. Normally he would have started the day in ‘the vertical position of vertebrate thought,’ standing ‘at a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spin, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study.”
— Brian Boyd

Lewis Carroll

“I’m not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
—
Carroll

“Standing at the upright desk he always used while writing, he managed to breathe life and laughter onto the dry leaves of paper that lay before him.”
—
Biographer Morton N. Cohen

Virginia Woolf

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
—
Woolf

Woolf worked at “a desk standing about three feet six inches high with a sloping top; it was so high that she had to stand to her work.”
— Quentin Bell, nephew and biographer

Philip Roth

“I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.”
—
Roth

“Roth wakes early and, seven days a week, walks fifty yards or so to a two-room studio. The front room is outfitted with a fireplace, a desk, and a computer set up on a kind of lectern where he can write standing up, the better to preserve a bad back. ”
— David Remnick, The New Yorker

Thomas Wolfe

“What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.”
—
Wolfe

August Wilson

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
— Wilson

“Wilson wrote standing up, at a high, cluttered accounting desk. For years, an Everlast punching bag was suspended from the ceiling about two steps behind. When Wilson was in full flow and the dialogue was popping, he’d stop, pivot, throw a barrage of punches, then turn back to work. ”
— John Lahr, The Guardian

Thomas Jefferson

“Health is worth more than learning.”
—
Jefferson

“The angle of the top, hinged at the front, can be adjusted with a ratchet stand. A bail handle pulls forward the front of the desk to reveal a flat, lined writing surface.”
—
Thomas Jefferson Foundation

John Henry Newman

“Another devotee of duty and a workaholic, he composed his autobiography in long shifts, standing at his desk, often in tears, once putting in sixteen hours non-stop on the writing.”
—
Frank McLynn

Stan Lee

“I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers. And then I began to realize: entertainment is one of the most important things in people’s lives. Without it they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you’re able to entertain people, you’re doing a good thing.”
—
Lee

“Always wrote standing up — good for the figure — and always faced the sun — good for the suntan!”
— Photo caption

Closing Thought

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
— Henry David Thoreau

Did you know there’s actually a mathematical formula for consistently producing creative work? It’s called the Effectiveness Equation. You can get my short, free, highly-tactical eBook on how to radically boost your effectiveness in writing and life right here.

Read Next

100+ Famous Authors and Their Writing Spaces
These 6 Pieces of Writing Advice Helped Sell More Than 6 Billion Books
These 7 Pieces of Writing Advice Helped Create 494 New York Times Bestsellers

Feeling inspired? Enter this free giveaway for a chance to win some of the best books on writing.

If you enjoyed this story, please share this photo essay with other writers in your life.


These 7 Pieces of Writing Advice Helped Create 494 New York Times Bestsellers

by jaredbrock

Hitting the New York Times bestseller list is hard. By most estimates, you need to sell at least 10,000 copies in a single week just to appear on the list, and potentially 3–10X to hit the #1 spot. So when an author consistently hits the NYT, it’s a truly impressive feat.

The following seven authors have made the storied bestseller list an average of 70 times each. They’ve captivated their readership for decades, and have entertained tens of millions of people in the process. Here is one great piece of advice from each:

Nora Roberts (195 bestsellers)

“A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don’t have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren’t going to finish a book… The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank one.”

John Grisham (41 bestsellers)

“I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal… Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers — the guys who steal all the money and take off. That’s the fun stuff.”

James Patterson (114 bestsellers)

“If it’s commercial fiction that you want to write, it’s story, story, story. You’ve got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they’ll go, “Tell me more.” And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more.And if you don’t, it won’t work. In terms of literary fiction, that’s something different. It should be a point of view on something that’s wonderful to read. Too often it’s just style. I think style can be fine, but I think it’s a little overrated if a book is nothing but style… I don’t think there are a lot of really readable books out there. There are less than people think there are. There’s a lot of stuff that you pick it up and you feel like, “I’ve read this before.” It’s very hard to grab people. I don’t think it’s an accident that I’m up there. I don’t think it’s an accident that John Grisham is up there. John Grisham grabs people. There are a few writers that do it. I don’t think it’s that easy, and it’s not a question of somebody who writes good sentences. It’s a question of people being able to tell stories in a way that captivates a lot of readers.”

Michael Connelly (28 bestsellers)

“Keep your head down. In other words, keep it in the story. Don’t look up at what is going on in publishing. Forget the trends or what stories are the focus of hot deals, etc. Just write your story, the one you know that you would like to read.”

Lee Child (44 bestsellers)

“Every writer has got 99 ideas but writing has two elements to it, figuring it out and getting it ready, getting it published. The first half is lazing on the sofa daydreaming, telling yourself stories. To an extent we’re servants of the reader… I write exclusively for the reader. I’m not interested in winning prizes or critical acclaim, I just want to give readers a few good days of entertainment. Happily I’ve got a lot of readers but I can’t unconceptualise an idea — so I come back to myself. I am the reader. I write one book a year and I read hundreds. But you never find a book that’s 100% what you want, so you have to write it yourself.”

Janet Evanovich (17 bestsellers)

“When I’m plotting out a book, I use a storyboard — I’ll have maybe three lines across on the storyboard and just start working through the plot line. I always know where relationships will go and how the book is going to end… Lots of times I’m not crazy about the writing, but I keep moving ahead and somehow it gets better. The important thing is to move forward… I don’t get writer’s block because I don’t believe in it. I believe you sit in front of the computer and force your fingers to get something on the screen.”

Stephen King (55 bestsellers)

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”


Feeling inspired? Enter this free giveaway for a chance to win 5 of the best books on writing.

Liked this article? Read These 6 Pieces of Writing Advice Helped Sell More Than 6 Billion Books

Want my top 60 book recommendations + a free eBook on how to boost your writing productivity? Download them here.

100+ Famous Authors and Their Writing Spaces

by jaredbrock

I often wish I had a special space in which to write my books. Sadly, the writing life doesn’t always come equipped with an idyllic woodland cabin in which to pen profound prose. For all the authors profiled below, they figured out how to be massively effective no matter the setting. They did the work.

Needless to say, this photo essay took a very long time to put together, but I hope it’s worth it. Now, for the first time, you can enjoy 100+ authors and their writing spaces, arranged alphabetically in one place. I hope you like the author photos and are inspired by all their incredible writing (and life) advice.

Recommended: Cosy up with a hot cup of coffee or tea and a journal and pen!

Agatha Christie

“You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder if it may not be all right after all.”

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Albert Camus

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

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Albert Einstein

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

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Alfred Hitchcock

“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”

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Allen Ginsberg

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”

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André Gide

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

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Andrew Carnegie

“People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.”

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Anne Frank

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

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Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.”

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Feeling inspired? Enter my free giveaway for a chance to win 5 of the best books on writing.

Anne Sexton

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”

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Anthony Burgess

“Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.”

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Arthur C. Clarke

“If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him.”

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Arthur Conan Doyle

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

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Arthur Miller

“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”

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Bob Dylan

“Get outside. Get out into the world, man! You wanna read poetry, look at the stars. Light a candle and write under the new moon. That’s when The Operator comes to whisper the Secret Words to you.”

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Carl Jung

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

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Carl Sandburg

“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.”

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Charles Bukowski

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

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Charles Dickens

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”

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Want more writing tips? These 7 Pieces of Writing Advice Helped Create 494 New York Times Bestsellers

Charles M. Schulz

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, rest this afternoon.”

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C. S. Lewis

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

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Dalton Trumbo

“When one many says, “No, I won’t,” Rome begins to fear.”

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Damon Runyon

“A person who asks questions can get a reputation such as a person who wishes to find things out.”

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Daphne Du Maurier

“Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”

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Dylan Thomas

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”

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E. B. White

“Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a man.”

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Edith Wharton

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

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Edward Albee

“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.”

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Edward Gorey

“If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.”

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Elmore Leonard

“1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it
.”

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Emil Cioran

“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”

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Émile Zola

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”

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Eric Carle

“Let’s put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.”

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Ready to dive in? Enter to win 5 great books on writing.

Ernest Hemingway

“Never compete with living writers. You don’t know whether they’re good or not. Compete with the dead ones you know are good. Then when you can pass them up you know you’re going good. You should have read all the good stuff so that you know what has been done, because if you have a story like one somebody else has written, yours isn’t any good unless you can write a better one. In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better, but the tendency should always be upward instead of down. And don’t ever imitate anybody.”

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Ezra Pound

“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

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Frederick Douglass

“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

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G. K. Chesterton

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”

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George Bernard Shaw

“My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.”

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George Orwell

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

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George Plimpton

“As anyone who listens to speeches knows, brevity is an asset.”

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Georges Simenon

“The fact that we are I don’t know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.”

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Read more great writing advice from Georges Simenon.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

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Gore Vidal

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

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We’re halfway through! Time for a commercial break:

I think the reason why most writers dream of a writing cabin is because they envision a sacred space that will somehow automatically allow them to do their best work. This is called fiction.

But did you know that there is an actual equation for effectiveness? There is a formula that, when practiced, will help you consistently create great work. Perhaps the day will come where you’ve have the ideal space in which to work. In the meantime, here’s a practical, tactical, proven method for regularly executing the deep work writing sessions that could help pay for that cabin in the woods. 🙂

Download The Effectiveness Equation for free.


Hans Christian Andersen

“Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.”

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Harlan Ellison

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

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Harper Lee (with Truman Capote)

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

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Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Since I began this note I have been called off at least a dozen times — once for the fish-man, to buy a codfish — once to see a man who had brought me some baskets of apples — once to see a book man…then to nurse the baby — then into the kitchen to make chowder for dinner and now I am at it again for nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write — it is rowing against wind and tide.”

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Heinrich Böll

“It’s true and it’s easily said that language is material, and something does materialize as one writes.”

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Henry Miller

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”

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H. L. Mencken

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

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Hunter S. Thompson

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

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Ian Fleming

“Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

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J. D. Salinger

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

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Jack Kerouac

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”

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Jack London

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

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Jackie Kennedy

“The deep desire to inspire people, to take an active part in the life of the country… We should all do something to right the wrongs that we see and not just complain about them.”

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James Baldwin

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

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James Patterson

“In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.”

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Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear… We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

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John Cheever

“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”

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John F. Kennedy

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

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John Fante

“For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don’t believe in yourself.”

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John Steinbeck

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

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John Updike

“You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.”

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Joseph Brodsky

“It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.”

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J. R. R. Tolkien

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

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Karen Blixen

“The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.”

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Katherine Anne Porter

“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”

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Kurt Vonnegut

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”

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Want more? These 6 Pieces of Writing Advice Helped Sell More Than 6 Billion Books

Leo Tolstoy

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

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Louisa May Alcott

“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”

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Margaret Mitchell

“The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business.”

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Mark Twain

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very.’ Your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

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Marlon Brando

“Regret is useless in life. It’s in the past. All we have is now.”

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Max Frisch

“It’s precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”

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Michel Foucault

“My job is making windows where there were once walls.”

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Mickey Spillane

“If you’re a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes.”

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Neil Gaiman

“A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”

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Nigella Lawson

“It’s true that I wouldn’t have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation.”

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Oliver Sacks

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”

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Orson Welles

“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”

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Patricia Highsmith

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”

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P. G. Wodehouse

“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.”

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Philip Pullman

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”

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Philip Roth

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

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Pier Paolo Pasolini

“An artist, if he’s unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.”

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Ramón Gómez de la Serna

“Writing is that they let you cry and laugh alone.”

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Ray Bradbury

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things…. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

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Raymond Carver

“You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”

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Roald Dahl

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.”

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Robert Frost

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

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Roberto Calasso

“Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.”

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Rudyard Kipling

“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”

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Saul Bellow

“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”

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Shuzo Takiguchi

“Now the globe suffers from severe nostalgia…”

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Want to radically improve your writing? Enter my free giveaway for a chance to win some of the best books on writing.

Simone de Beauvoir

“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”

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Somerset Maugham

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

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Stephen King

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

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Read more great writing advice from Stephen King.

Susan Sontag

“My library is an archive of longings.”

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Sylvia Plath

“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”

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Ted Kooser

“Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay.”

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Tennessee Williams

“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.”

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Theodore Roosevelt

“I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”

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Truman Capote

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

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T.S. Eliot

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea
.”

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Vera and Vladimir Nabokov

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

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Virginia Woolf

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

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W. Somerset Maugham

(I know I already shared a WSM pic, but I couldn’t resist the dog!)

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

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Wallace Stegner

“Hard writing makes easy reading.”

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Walt Whitman

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment — to put things down without deliberation — without worrying about their style — without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote — wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”

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William F. Buckley Jr.

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”

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William Faulkner

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

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William S. Burroughs

“Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.”

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Winston Churchill

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy then an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then it becomes a tyrant and, in the last stage, just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

Bravery bonus: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

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