Video: Why stories matter – 80 years of perspective

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Stories outlive us. How will anyone know your story if you don't write it down? That's a good reason to consider hiring a professional ghostwriter.

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

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

Michael Burke

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

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

Romulus Linney

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

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

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.

Quentin Tarantino

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

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

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Roald Dahl

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

A writer is a world trapped in a person.