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

Rest in peace, brother. You shall be missed.
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.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
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.”
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
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.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
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.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

























