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...

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

Steven Bochco

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

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

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

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

Tom Clancy

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

G.K. Chesterton

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

Michael Burke

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Edward Albee

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

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

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.