This is yet another installment in the Writer's Remorse series on quotes from famous writers. Check out the quotes from everyone from Stephen King to Shakespeare to see what these authors have to say about the art of writing.

Scott Adams:  Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Tom Clancy:  The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

TS Eliot:  There is no method but to be very intelligent.

TS Eliot:  Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.

 Ernest Hemingway:  If you're looking for messages, try Western Union.
 

Ernest Hemingway:  The first draft of everything is shit.

Ernest Hemingway:  My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

Samuel Johnson:  Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

 W Somerset Maugham:  There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Pete Murphy:  Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.

Edna O'Brien:  Fuck the plot.

Ring Lardner: Don't make the mistake of enclosing a self-addressed envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation for the editor.

Stephen King: People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Larry McMurtry:  Most heartfelt, I thank my typewriter. My typewriter is a Hermes 3000, surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius.

John Grisham:  The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.

Pat Conroy:  Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Anna Quindlen If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.


Shakespeare (Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 1–4):  Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,?trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our?players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

J. K. Rowling:  Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.