Augusten Burroughs Quotes

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

The best way to learn to write is to read in the genre you might be interested in; then, you need to actually sit down and write. In a lot of cases, the first book you write will not get published. Do not get hung up on that. Start a second book.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

Something I always tell students is, when you're writing something, you want to write the first draft and you want it to come out easily in the beginning. If you're afraid to say what you really have to say, you stammer. [...] You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

I carry around a little journal with me, a little notebook and a pen and just write all the time. Not necessarily actually sitting down and writing lyrics, just free-form writing, whatever's going on in my mind.

You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.

I just write what I think is good and keep it at a thousand words.

I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... it's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.

And my experience is the best titles, for me, emerge in the process of writing. They don't usually come at the very beginning and hopefully they don't come at the very end because then it's getting late in the day.

You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.

Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way