I’m reconfiguring Ghostwriters Central. The first change was to bring Kate Jonez on board. She’s a marvelous writer, Read More...
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
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.
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.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

























