Ytvideo

Video: A screenwriting ghostwriter has an ethics problem.

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

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

T.S. Eliot

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

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

Sidney Sheldon

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

Romulus Linney

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

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

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

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

Edward Albee

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.

Elbert Hubbard

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

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

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.