Pauline at Barnes & Noble reportedly said: THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!

17 Sep, 2017

Can you use a good laugh? David Thorne is an Australian writer, humorist and satirist. I think he's a really funny guy. He's got a website that I discovered today. I clicked on a page that details a 2015 email exchange with a book-signing coordinator with Barnes & Noble by the name of Pauline. Apparently David set up a book-signing date at a B&N store without notifying B&N. It came to the attention of Pauline. And it rapidly went downhill from there. Really funny stuff. Here's the link. Have fun! That's not how it works.

Pauline at Barnes & Noble reportedly said: THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!

September 17, 2017May 9, 2025

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...

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Edward Albee

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

Michael Burke

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

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

Lawrence Wray

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.”

Neil Gaiman

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

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

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

Tom Clancy

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.

Chet Cunningham

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

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

Thomas Wolfe

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

Douglas Adams

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

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

Matthew Arnold

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.