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.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

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

C. J. Cherryh

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

Michael Burke

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

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

Joseph Conrad

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

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

M. K. Simmons

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.