Matt R.

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Matt R.

Thank you so much for your hard work on this. I love how this is shaping out. I’m presenting around 8:30 this evening so the hard deadline will be around 7pm. You are extraordinarily good at this and I’d love to work with you on future speeches, to build off of this one. I’m available by email and phone for the rest of the day if you have questions as we work to go final on this.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

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

C. J. Cherryh

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.