Crazy Quotes from Crazyhorse

The literary journal Crazyhorse had a contest for best quotes about writing. Here are some of my favorites, from their top 20 (for the whole list of a hundred quotations, join the mailing list for their e-newsletter):

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.”

—John Dos Passos

“I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.”
—William Faulkner

“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
—Flannery O’Connor

“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”
—Isak Dinesen

“Write, damn you! What else are you good for?”
—James Joyce

“If I don’t write to empty my mind I go mad.”
—Lord Byron

“I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.”
—Amy Hempel

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.”
—Winston Churchill

“Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God.”
—Jack Kerouac

"There are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are."
—Wm. Somerset Maugham

"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
—Susan Sontag

“We put on our stories before our clothes….”
—William Wenthe

“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

"All I am is the trick of words writing themselves."
—Anne Sexton