Stay true to your brand. So to speak.

25 Feb, 2024

I was nearly done reading a magazine about the world's best whiskeys when I came upon this. I began laughing, and I was stone cold sober (I seldom drink). Are you a writer? Married to a writer? Are you a wannabe writer? Do you have a writer friend? Hop on over to Total Wine & More, swipe the gold card and pick up a bottle of this fine Irish whiskey. A perfect gift. Unless they don't drink at all. You're welcome.

Stay true to your brand. So to speak.

February 25, 2024May 9, 2025

I was nearly done reading a magazine about the world’s best whiskeys when I came upon this. I began laughing, and I was stone Read More...

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

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

Lisa See

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

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

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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.

Will Rogers

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Stephen King

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

Michael Burke

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

Sidney Sheldon

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Matthew Arnold

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

T.S. Eliot

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

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.