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Video: Why you should hire an American writer.

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Tom Clancy

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

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

Christopher Hampton

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

E. B. White

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

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

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

Jeanette Walls

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

Thomas Wolfe

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

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

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Edward Albee

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

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.