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Video: Are you laying down or lying down?

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

E. B. White

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

Mickey Spillane

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

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

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

Christopher Hampton

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

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

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

Tom Clancy

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

Stan Lee

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

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

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

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

Jim Morrison

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

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

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.