“You have in no way missed the window on finding a satisfying career or a stable relationship, if those are things that you want. And that’s a question you should spend some time with. Do you actually want a life like the ones the people you follow on social media are pretending to have (because abso…”— Brandy Jensen, theoutline.com
“We all know it: writing — literally just the act of sitting down and starting to write — is physically impossible.”— Katie Heaney, thecut.com
“Let me be clear, most of the writing I did today was trash. That's not me being humble or self-deprecating. It's just fact.”— Roxane Gay, twitter.com
“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.”— Thomas Harris, amazon.com
“There’s a stereotype that writers thrust their work upon anyone they meet: Do you want to read my book? Do you want to read my poems? Do you want to see why I’m the next Hemingway? I am not one of those writers.”— Georgia Knapp, electricliterature.com
“Eat, Pray, Love felt about as authentic to me as the heroine's "journey" on The Bachelor: Either she triumphed against all odds, or she quietly disappeared. It had to be a certain kind of redemptive narrative for a certain kind of lady at a certain stage in life when perhaps she has taken to wistful…”— Carina Chocano, amazon.com
“At the start of the book, Gilbert paints herself as a desperate suburban housewife in the throes of a nervous breakdown. But she was already a prize-winning journalist. She was rich. She'd had stories made into movies.”— Carina Chocano, amazon.com
“I think writers’ expectations of these two kinds of progress are usually backwards: They believe their talent is basically static, and progress will come mostly in the form of their talent being gradually more recognized. But the healthier and more realistic way to think about your career is that yo…”— Elisa Gabbert, electricliterature.com
“I do need to defend myself against the implication that I “had the immense privilege of working on your passion project without worrying about money.” I was extremely worried about money! I was broke all through college and wrote for free anyway, and that got me a Gawker Media job for $30,000 a year…”— Nick Douglas, splinternews.com
“We need to reality-check our expectations. Just because we don't sit down and channel the great American novel in one week doesn't mean we won't be good writers. And we need to remember that behind every 'naturally gifted' person is normally a huge amount of work, dedication and commitment.”— Brené Brown, amazon.com
“Become great the boring way. The obsessive way. Watch 100 stars be born that aren't you. Learn to be cool with it.”— John Mayer, instagram.com
“There is too much motivation to become a brand and not enough to become great at something.”— John Mayer, instagram.com
“I honestly had no fucking clue what I was doing, I just made it up as I went along.”— Amy Kaufman, themuse.jezebel.com
“The hardest part for me was honestly the analytical part of exploring not only my own interests but America’s fascination with it, because I’m not even sure I got to the bottom of it, frankly.”— Amy Kaufman, themuse.jezebel.com
“Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”— Cheryl Strayed, therumpus.net
“We had someone whose full-time job was saying, "How do we make this into a business?”— Choire Sicha, fashionista.com
“Nick Denton initially hired me to write for a site he was about to launch called Flesh Bot, which was intended to be a site about adult things. I did not want to do that. [Laughs] And fortunately, Elizabeth Spiers retired before that site launched so he instead was like, "Oh, you're here. Just take…”— Choire Sicha, fashionista.com
“I always wanted to be a writer when I was younger, but I didn't think it was ever possible, and so I didn't take it seriously or actually even really think about it. This happens, I think, in a lot of fields, including fashion and media and TV, things that seem exciting and far away when you're youn…”— Choire Sicha, fashionista.com
“This is boring, but the greatest thing for me — and I see this with young writers sometimes, that they don't have — is I had to write constantly. It was very good on a sentence-by-sentence level and at establishing voice. Most of voice is just a series of crutches applied regularly, and when you're…”— Choire Sicha, fashionista.com