What books about the writing process most inspire the world’s great writers? As part of Writing Routines, we asked famous writers about the books that helped them with their work—the ones that reflected on the writing and creative process in such a unique or poignant way that they return to them regularly.
Here are 40 of the best quotes from the best books on writing and the writing process:
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Publishing giant Tim Ferriss recommends Bird by Bird to anyone–writer or not: “If you plan on any creative undertaking, whether business, writing, or art, I strongly recommend the book…If you spend a lot of time working alone and get trapped in your head, it’s required reading. It saved my sanity and has done the same for several friends who’ve gone from ‘I want to quit’ to New York Times bestsellers.”
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“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
“E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”
On Writing is a favorite of Deep Work author Cal Newport, Barking Up the Wrong Tree author Eric Barker, and The Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief John Avlon—and the fact that it has fans as diverse as academics and daily journalists goes to show how powerfully it has impacted its audience.
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“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
“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.”
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.”
“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
Countless writer’s we’ve had the opportunity to interview, including two connoisseurs of these kinds of books—Ryan Holiday and Jeff Goins—chose The War of Art by Steven Pressfield as an inspiring addition to their collection of books on creativity and the written word.
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“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
“The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.”
“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”
“It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”
What is the favorite book on the process of someone who has written such a popular one himself? With so many writers having raved about The War of Art, we had to ask Steven Pressfield just that. “My favorite book on the writing process? The War of Art. I mean it. But if I had to suggest others, I’d say definitely Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.”
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“I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.”
“Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.”
“But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working”
“There is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that’s habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.”
“Remember this when you’re struggling for a big idea. You’re much better off scratching for a small one.”
It’s a book that has stood the test of time, sold over a million-and-a-half copies, and is probably the book that all of us start reading when we enter into the “good books about writing” genre.
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“But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components… clear thinking becomes clear writing.”
“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”
“There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is to come to terms with your life narrative. Another is to work through some of life’s hardest knocks—loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure—and to find understanding and solace.”
“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”
“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”
When TJ Stiles—ace historian whose histories are as good as novels—and Aaron Thier—one of his generation’s up-and-coming novelists—single out a book for mention, you know it’s worth looking at.
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“Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”
“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”
“Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.”
“And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us: they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.”
“The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”
The poet Dorothy Parker once said, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
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“The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.”
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
“If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!”… Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?”
“When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.”
“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
As Eric Barker put it, “David Mamet’s little book about directing turns out to be one of the best books on writing.”
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“My experience as a director, and as a dramatist, is this: the piece is moving in proportion to how much the author can leave out. A good writer gets better by learning to remove the ornamental, the descriptive… What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of her one goal.”
“How do we keep the audience’s attention? Certainly not by giving them more information but, on the contrary, by withholding information—by withholding all information except that information in the absence of which would make the progress of the story incomprehensible.”
“The making of a story… consists of the assiduous application of several very basic questions: What does the hero want? What hinders him from getting it? What happens if he does not get it? That’s what keeps the audience in their seats… The story can only be interesting because we find the progress of the protagonist interesting. As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.”
“If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).”
“My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.”
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