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...
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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.
Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
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.
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.

























