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Video: A screenwriting ghostwriter has an ethics problem.

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

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

Romulus Linney

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

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

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

G.K. Chesterton

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

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

Thomas Jefferson

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Sidney Sheldon

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

Matthew Arnold

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

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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