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Video: Why you should hire an American writer.

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

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

Raymond Chandler

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

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

Stephen King

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

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

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

Edward Albee

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

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

William Shawn

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

Stephen Wright

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Thomas Wolfe

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

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

Romulus Linney

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

T.S. Eliot

A writer is a world trapped in a person.