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Video: Are you laying down or lying down?

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 can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

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

Tom Clancy

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

Edward Albee

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

Mickey Spillane

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Roald Dahl

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

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

Stan Lee

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

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

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

William Shawn

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

William Goldman

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

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