The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

02 Dec, 2019

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn't aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of Read More...

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.

Mark Twain

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

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

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.

Robert Benchley

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

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.

Bob Dylan

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

Michael Burke

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

Tom Clancy

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.

Elbert Hubbard

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.