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...

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

M. K. Simmons

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

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

Romulus Linney

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

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.

William C. Gault

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

Gloria Steinem

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 blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

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

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

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

T.S. Eliot

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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.

Roddy Doyle

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.”