Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Kurt Vonnegut
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
Tracy Kidder
You cannot write well without data.
George V. Higgins
THE BEST WRITING advice I’ve ever received is: “Facts are eloquent.”
Norrie Epstein
Yvetot [a small town in the north of France] is as good as Constantinople.
Gustave Flaubert
If you have to urge a writing student to “gain experience with life,” he is probably never going to be a writer. Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Nikki Giovanni
A novelist is stuck with his youth. We spend it without paying much attention to how it will work out as material; nevertheless, we must draw on whatever was there for the rest of our lives.
Vance Bourjaily
Every writer must articulate from the specific. They must reach down where they stand, because there is nothing else from which to draw.
Gloria Naylor
Very much of a novelist’s work must appertain to the intercourse between young men and young women.
Anthony Trollope
Write about what you know personally, limited though it may be. Get your facts right. Try to write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Frederick Forsyth
Study yr keeds. Kids. There are a lot of poems there. But don’t write about yr kids. Write about the human, what’s left of him, where he’s going, what he dropped on the floor.
Charles Bukowski,
IN A LETTER TO Ann Bauman (1962)
One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or 10 years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That’s what you wanted to write about, about what you didn’t know So. What mysterious time and place don’t we know?
Ken Kesey
Writing teachers invariably tell students, Write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing. What did Kafka know? The insurance business? So that kind of advice is foolish, because it presumes that you have to go out to a war to be able to do war. Well, some do and some don’t. I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
E. L. Doctorow
THE BEST ADVICE I’ve ever received was from Barbara Kafka: “Don’t put in all you know—you will live to write again.”
Corby Kummer
Writing fails because the writer does not know enough about his material. If he knows enough he will feel enough.
William Sloane
A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
Poke around.
William Carlos Williams
Write what makes you happy.
O. Henry
Write about what you’re most afraid of.
Donald Barthelme
The effable is preferable to the ineffable.
Primo Levi
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter.
E. B. White
Choice of subject is of cardinal importance. One does by far one’s best work when besotted by and absorbed in the matter at hand.
Jessica Mitford
There are only two things to write about: life and death.
Edward Albee