Gloria Steinem Quotes

Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

I don't have a trunk of manuscripts.

I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.

Writing is difficult. It's a time commitment, it's labor and I'd have to get myself to sit down and actually do the work and outline.

The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline.

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

I like to write short stories more because I never met a writer who wasn't lazy. And a short story is, by its very definition, short. It is something that generally you can turn out in a week to two weeks depending on how well it goes for you. But, at the same time, it gives the same satisfaction of creating a complete world.

I don't spend the day writing. I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.

During the day, if I don't have any other commitments, I'm usually at my desk writing, revising, or researching anywhere from four to six hours.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

I have stacks and stacks of journals. I'll change the names if I ever decide to publish them.

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.