On Writing...
Authors Say the Darnedest Things

On discipline

• "… it's always a question of discipline. You know, talent is God given and you can learn every trick in the book, but if you don't have the discipline to sit down and hone your craft and do it every God damn day, then you're not going to get anywhere."
  Greg Rucka, from Inside the Comic Book Writers' Studio

On literature:

• "When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similiar to the control a great pitcher has over a ball."
  Raymond Chandler
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• "I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper."
  Steve Martin, star and co-writer of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

On the pulps

• "Yes, I am a hack. A hack writer banging at deadlines. Slapping words into place. Finding errors in judgment 100 pages back that it’s too fucking late to do anything about so I better figure out a way to force the plot to make up for it in the next 50 pages. This is how pulp is made....Pulp isn’t a .45 and a fedora and a monster lurking and a dame in a short skirt and a low cut blouse and a 36-24-36 figure, it’s a story cranked out for love or money when there’s no time to sweat about the last word you wrote or the one after the one you’re writing right fucking now."
  Charlie Huston

On editors:

• "When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so that it will stay split."
  Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "To entrust to an editor a story over which you have labored and to which your name and reputation are attached can be like sending your daughter off for an evening with Ted Bundy."
  Edna Buchanan

On the public:

• "The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels. "
  Rex Stout
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• "My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly."
  John D. MacDonald
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• "I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write."
  John D. MacDonald
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• "Those big shot writers...could never dig the fact that there are more peanuts consumed than caviar."
  Mickey Spillane
  
  
• "My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell."
  David Simon, from an interview with Nick Hornby

On love in mysteries:

• "Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem." "
  Raymond Chandler

On fair play in mysteries:

• "At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must appear inevitable."
  Raymond Chandler.

On moving the plot along:

• ""When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."
  Raymond Chandler, from the introduction to Trouble Is My Business

On deadlines:

• "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
  Douglas Adams

On the actual writing:

• "The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them."
  Raymond Chandler
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• "Through joy and through sorrow, I--wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I--wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I--wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I--wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say."
  Edgar A. Poe
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• "That's what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn't like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. you already learned in school how to write, didn't you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas... where they belong, if you aren't positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I've even seen scripts where I know wortds weren't spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don't think it's too important."
  From Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard
  (By the way, notice that ALL Leonard's commas are in the RIGHT place)
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• "Words are great foes of reality."
  Joseph Conrad
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• "What's the use of kicking?"
  Jim Thompson

On the Rules of Writing

• "There are no rules. You can write a story, if you wish, with no conflict, no suspense, no beginning, middle or end. Of course, you have to be regarded as a genius to get away with it, and that's the hardest part -- convincing everybody you're a genius."
  Frederic Brown

List respectfully compiled by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Scott Wolven for his contributions.