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Video: A screenwriting ghostwriter has an ethics problem.

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

Tom Clancy

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

Lawrence Wray

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

Michael Burke

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

Mickey Spillane

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

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

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

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

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

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Jodi Picoult

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

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

Oscar Wilde

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

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

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

Stephen King

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.