Quotes from the Pros

Blogs are things novelists keep to distract them from the fact that they're not writing novels. So with no further ado, here are a few quotes from the pros, courtesy of my writer sister Ruth.

--

When you start writing you're 98% pure writer and 2%
critic. After you've written for a length of time,
you've learned a great deal about your craft, and you've
become 2% pure writer and 98% critic. It's like writing
uphill.

David Westheimer
--

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone.
Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading
magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching
infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can
to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning
and you reach the point where you have to write. Having
anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me
would be grisly.

Paul Rudnick
--

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank
sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your
forehead.

Gene Fowler
--

I loved Feydeau's one rule of playwriting: Character A:
My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B.
Knock Knock. Enter Character B.

P. Guare
--

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you
start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your
writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene
O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs
start to go wrong.

Meredith Willson

--
They have followed their usual procedure and handed my
treatment over to several other people to make a
screenplay out of it. By the time they are ready to
shoot it may have been through 20 pairs of hands. What
will be left? One shudders to think. Meanwhile, they
have paid me a lot of money...

Aldous Huxley

--

Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody
offers within three years, the candidate may look upon
this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended
for.

Mark Twain
--

Writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very
bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book
is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some
painfull illness. One would never undertake such a thing
if one were not driven by some demon one can neither
resist nor understand.

George Orwell
--

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to STAY a
writer.

Harlan Ellison