Caitlin Moran Quotes

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

You become a great writer by writing.

When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.

The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.

Mainly I love working on good writing.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.

Writing tips are like mini skirts. Sometimes they fit perfectly, sometimes they make you cry, and sometimes you can reuse the material and sew yourself a pillow or something.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time.

You won't make a living writing until you learn to write when you don't want to.

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.

Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

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

And that's what I've learned too: writing is key.

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

I probably could be a world-class screenwriter by now if I had spent the kind of work I devote on Comedy Death-Ray to that. But I do okay, in that regard. I mean, my stuff gets bought, so it's all right.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.