Ytvideo

Video: A screenwriting ghostwriter has an ethics problem.

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

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

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

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

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

Tom Clancy

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

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

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

Roald Dahl

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

Stan Lee

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

William Goldman

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

Lisa See

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

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

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

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

Edward Albee

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.