Gore Vidal Quotes

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I prefer writing originals.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

People always say, 'Write what you know', but I've always found that to be terrible advice. It's quite limiting, what you know.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

When I try to write I try to write something different every time. That's the challenge.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.