I’m reconfiguring Ghostwriters Central. The first change was to bring Kate Jonez on board. She’s a marvelous writer, Read More...
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
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.
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.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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.
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.”
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
























