Because every
story begins
with words

video lou stillman’s boxing gym

Exclusive ghostwriting videos!

Writers & Storytellers: Lou Stillman’s boxing gym.

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

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

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

Jim Morrison

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

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

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

Thomas Jefferson

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

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

Jodi Picoult

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 writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Roald Dahl

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

Edward Albee

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

Romulus Linney

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

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

Tom Clancy