Ytvideo

Video: Are you laying down or lying down?

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

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

Matthew Arnold

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

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

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Sidney Sheldon

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

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

Mickey Spillane

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

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

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

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

William Shawn

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

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

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

Robert A. Heinlein

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

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

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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.