Video: Why stories matter – 80 years of perspective

Ytvideo

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.

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

Thomas Wolfe

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

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

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

Stephen King

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

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.

Robert Benchley

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

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

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

Stephen Wright

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

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.