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.

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

Romulus Linney

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

Mickey Spillane

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

Jeanette Walls

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

M. K. Simmons

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

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

Sidney Sheldon

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

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

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Tom Clancy

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

William Goldman

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

Stephen Wright

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.

William C. Gault

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

C. J. Cherryh

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

Roald Dahl

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.