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.

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

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

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

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

Michael Burke

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

Tom Clancy

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

Raymond Chandler

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Roald Dahl

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

Dan Poynter

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote Quote

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

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.