Because every
story begins
with words

Bob Dylan

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.

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

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

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

Matthew Arnold

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

G.K. Chesterton

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

M. K. Simmons

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

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

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

Tom Clancy

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

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

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

Romulus Linney

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

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

Lisa See