As a person who makes one’s living as a writer, you must know that November isn’t just a month after Halloween, before Christmas, with Thanksgiving in the middle. It is a month of self-sacrifice and dedication, aspirations and hopes, poor eating and a lack of sleep for the sake of a major goal: 50,000 words until 23:59 on November, 30. It is the great holiday of NaNoWriMo.

During these four weeks, you are not supposed to spend any minute surfing the web. The Internet is full of revelations by authors who consider themselves great. They are ready to give advice to anyone thoughtless enough to ask. And we prefer you to choose something useful and motivational from the best craftsmen of the pen. That’s why in this article, we decided to gather quotes from those who proved themselves to be great writers by winning a Nobel Prize in literature.

Some of you might say that the Nobel Prize is sometimes given as a reaction to the political environment rather than as a recognition of literary talent. It may be so. But it doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can learn from those winners.

If this is your first NaNoWriMo and you’ve just decided to try yourself in literature, great writers will try to talk you out of it

But there will be those who will give precise pieces of advice to aspiring newcomers

William Faulkner, awarded in 1949: “For fiction, the best age is from thirty-five to forty-five. Your fire is not all used up and you know more. Fiction is slower. For poetry, the best age is from seventeen to twenty-six. Poetry writing is more like a skyrocket with all your fire condensed into one rocket.”

William Faulkner, awarded in 1949: “Don’t be ‘a writer’ but instead be writing. Being ‘a writer’ means being stagnant. The act of writing shows movement, activity, life. When you stop moving, you’re dead. It’s never too soon to start writing, as soon as you learn to read.”

Some of them will persuade you to always stay true to yourself

André Gide, awarded in 1947: “What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.”

William Gerald Golding, awarded in 1983: “It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.”

Toni Morrison, awarded in 1993: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Or at least to write only the truth

William Faulkner, awarded in 1949: “The real truths come from human hearts. Don’t try to present your ideas to the reader. Instead, try to describe your characters as you see them. Take something from one person you know, something from another, and you yourself create a third person that people can look at and see something they understand.”

Eyvind Johnson, awarded in 1974: “A writer’s work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.”

And try to stay simple, especially when you’re writing about difficult things

Winston Churchill, awarded in 1953: “Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge. Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words when short are best of all.”

Albert Camus, awarded in 1957: “Those who write clearly have readers.”

Boris Pasternak, awarded in 1958: “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, awarded in 1964: “I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.”

They will tell you to leave yourself a hook to stay enthusiastic about writing the next day

William Faulkner, awarded in 1949: “The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell, and you have trouble with it. It’s—what’s the saying—leave them while you’re looking good.”

Ernest Hemingway, awarded in 1954: “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

They will show you how to create an alive character you will miss and will be eager to meet again

Ernest Hemingway, awarded in 1954: “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

Albert Camus, awarded in 1957: “A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.”

Harold Pinter, awarded in 2005: “I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.”

They say a brilliant reader makes a great writer. And some of them will share their to-read list.

William Faulkner, awarded in 1949: “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You’ll absorb it. Write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

Gabriel García Márquez, awarded in 1982: “Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft—not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.”

Dario Fo, awarded in 1997: “It is from Beolco Ruzzante, that I’ve learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing.”

Motivation helps only in the short term. For your 50,000 words, they will offer you something more effective: persistence.

T.S. Eliot, awarded in 1948: “Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.”

Winston Churchill, awarded in 1953: “Perfecting your writing is a lifelong task. If you are a persistent writer, you can expect your abilities to improve with time. Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Ernest Hemingway, awarded in 1954: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Patrick White, awarded in 1973: “I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.”

They will explain how to save yourself from chasing goals that are not really yours, by analyzing why you are writing

Albert Camus, awarded in 1957: “We must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.”

Nadine Gordimer, awarded in 1991: “Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”

Some of them will try to save you from working with your friends and relatives on one piece of writing

George Bernard Shaw, awarded in 1925: “Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous.”

And many of them will assure you that writing is not about money, houses, yachts, and recognition

George Bernard Shaw, awarded in 1925: “Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.”

George Bernard Shaw, awarded in 1925: “If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.”

William Faulkner, awarded in 1949: “Keep it amateur. You’re not writing for money but for pleasure. It should be fun. And it should be exciting. Maybe not as you write, but after it’s done you should feel an excitement, a passion. That doesn’t mean feeling proud, sitting there gloating over what you’ve done. It means you know you’ve done your best. Next time it’s going to be better.”

William Faulkner, awarded in 1949: “Don’t make writing your work. Get another job so you’ll have money to buy the things you want in life. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t count on money and a deadline for your writing. You’ll be able to find plenty of time for writing, no matter how much time your job takes. I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t find enough time to write what he wanted.”

They will teach you even more with their plays, novels, poems, and articles

And we remind you that the National Novel Writing Month is a non-stop marathon and you’ve already spent 7 minutes reading this piece. In the days of sorrow and decay, you will think you will never be among those published authors giving advice. Maybe you’re right. On the other hand, you can never say for sure until you try and finish at least one novel. Get back to it. 50,000 words won’t write themselves.