Can you use a good laugh? David Thorne is an Australian writer, humorist and satirist. I think he’s a really funny guy. Read More...
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.
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.
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.
Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.
When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
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.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
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.
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

























