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Video: A screenwriting ghostwriter has an ethics problem.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

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

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

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

Douglas Adams

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Lawrence Wray

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

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

Jim Morrison

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

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

Romulus Linney

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

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

Christopher Hampton

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

Easy reading is damn hard writing.