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, 2024June 4, 2026

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...

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.

Quentin Tarantino

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

C. J. Cherryh

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

Dan Poynter

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.

J.K. Rowling

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

Stan Lee

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

Raymond Chandler

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

Michael Burke

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

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

Romulus Linney

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

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.”

Neil Gaiman

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

Gloria Steinem

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

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.

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