A moment of silence, please, for a giant of a writer.

09 Jan, 2020

Buck Henry, screenwriter and actor, 1930-2020.

Buck Henry, the legendary screenwriter, has died. With Mel Brooks, he co-created Get Smart (1965-1970). He adapted the screenplay for The Graduate (1967), and wrote:

The Owl and the Pussycat
What's Up, Doc?
The Day of the Dolphin
To Die For

He hosted Saturday Night Live 10 times. He acted in more than 40 films. He played himself pitching a movie in The Player. He directed films and TV shows. Twitter has been flooded with tributes, including this one, which had me laughing for five minutes:

Rest in peace, brother. You shall be missed.

A moment of silence, please, for a giant of a writer.

January 9, 2020May 9, 2025

Buck Henry, the legendary screenwriter, has died. With Mel Brooks, he co-created Get Smart (1965-1970). He adapted the Read More...

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

Steven Bochco

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Edward Albee

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

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

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

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

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

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

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

Tom Clancy

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.

E. L. Doctorow

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

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

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.