Because every
story begins
with words

George Singleton

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.

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

Jeanette Walls

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

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

Romulus Linney

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

William Shawn

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

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 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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Joseph Conrad

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

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

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

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

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

Sidney Sheldon

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

Michael Burke

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

Tom Clancy