Because every
story begins
with words

Robert Altman

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.

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

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

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

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

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

C. J. Cherryh

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

Matthew Arnold

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

Stan Lee

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

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

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

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

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Robert A. Heinlein

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

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

Lisa See