You Must Cry

How can you write if you can't cry? --Ring Lardner

What's Your Obsession?

Writers write about what obsesses them.  You draw the cards.  I lost my mother when I was 14.  My daughter died at the age of 6.  I lost my faith as a Catholic.  When I'm writing, the darkness is always there.  I go where the pain is."

                                                                      --Anne Rice

Advice to a Young Writer

To a young writer, William Faulkner urged: "Read, read, read. Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!  You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out.  If it's not, throw it out the window."

You Must Be Driven

People who write are driven.  Otherwise nobody would do it.  I mean, I was warned when I began writing that it was very, very hard.  I thought it was easy.  I thought, well, you don't have to show up anywhere and go to work, and you can make up stories, and so forth.  But I was warned, rightly, that it was very, very hard work.  All writers who regularly write, I think are driven.

                                                                             -Robert Stone 

How Much Money Can You Make From Writing?

You can make a lot of money from writing, but you’re more likely to earn a lot of heartbreak—but sometimes that can be more valuable.

                                         CJ Farley